Understanding user behavior to improve software products is the main purpose of usability testing. Usability testing is an important issue for any interactive application. There are many books on this topic. This book focuses on usability testing for one specific type of product: surveys, particularly web- and application-based surveys. Considering this specificity, the book is highly original; I have not found anything similar.

When I started reading this book, I was a bit skeptical about its rather narrow scope. Very quickly, however, I realized that it is perfectly reasonable to have a book on such a topic. Surveys are frequently used and usability plays an extremely significant role because the quality of the data collected is important. Surveys are aimed at researching respondents’ views on a particular topic, so how respondents interact with the survey and how they understand questions in the survey affect the quality of the survey. Surveys--mainly web- and mobile-based surveys--have many specific issues worthy of analysis.

The book is not about usability test design, even though the authors discuss certain aspects of survey design, especially those that affect usability. The book is centered on the mechanics of usability testing, which is used to evaluate surveys.

The book is divided into an introduction, eight chapters, a glossary of terms, and an index. Each chapter includes references (many of which are very useful). The book guides readers through the background of usability and surveys (chapters 1 to 3), and then continues with planning (chapters 4 and 5), conducting (chapters 6 and 7), and evaluating (chapter 8) usability studies.

Overall, the book takes a practical look at the important problem of usability testing for surveys. Readers familiar with usability testing will appreciate this specialized view of the survey research domain. Readers who are familiar with software development will see many similarities between the design and evaluation of surveys and the iterative design and testing of software applications.

The book is very readable, with many examples and case studies presented throughout. The authors include many details, for example, forms, scenarios with dialogues, examples of scripts, guidelines for crafting probes, “why” questions, and many hints, all of which are very useful when designing a usability study for surveys. The examples demonstrate how to best conduct usability testing and analysis. The authors also discuss real-life situations, including an agile approach. It is clear they have immense experience in usability testing for surveys.

I would recommend this book mostly to practitioners, that is, I agree with the authors:

This book is designed for: those who conduct surveys but have no formal training in survey methods or usability testing; those who are familiar with survey methods but not usability testing; [and] those who are familiar with usability testing, but not how to tailor it to surveys.

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