RITE Method
A powerful formative usability inspection method that identifies early interface problems
RITE Method, for Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation, typically referred to as "RITE" testing, is an iterative usability method. It was defined by Michael Medlock, Dennis Wixon, Bill Fulton, Mark Terrano and Ramon Romero. It has been publicly championed by Dennis Wixon while working in the games space for Microsoft. It has many similarities to "traditional" or "discount" usability testing. The tester and team must define a target population for testing, schedule participants to come into the lab, decide on how the users' behaviors will be measured, construct a test script and have participants engage in a verbal protocol (e.g. think aloud). However, it differs from these methods in that it advocates that changes to the user interface are made as soon as a problem is identified and a solution is clear. Sometimes this can occur after observing as few as one participant. Once the data for a participant has been collected the usability engineer and team decide if they will be making any changes to the prototype prior to the next participant. The changed interface is then tested with the remaining users. class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1022" src="http://moha.studio/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/1-KpN6BuPLTOTo1YaFKRugUw.png" alt="" width="744" height="701" />
- A powerful formative usability inspection method that identifies early interface problems
- This is a rigorous method used to evaluate and identify interface problems, quickly fix them, and then empirically verify the efficacy of the fixes.
- RITE explores user behavior insights relative to design direction as opposed to summative goals, which measure usability issues.
- Prototypes are changed as soon as problems are identified and the team agrees to a solution, and the fix is then retested with more participants.
- Scheduled tests continue after each design change until there is a string of successes with no failures.
- Domain knowledge can help observers prioritize fixes based on their judgment of true problems versus what is an artifact of a particular participant.
- RITE begins when you have a low-fidelity prototype to test, in order to fix issues before time and resources are spent producing a high-fidelity prototype.