List the Data You Will Collect

This sect-ion of the test plan provides an overview of the types of measures you will collect during the test, both performance and preference data. Performance data, representing measures of participant behavior, includes error rates, number of accesses of the help by task, time to perform a task, and so on.

Preference data, representing measures of participant opinion or thought process, includes participant rankings, answers to questions, and so forth. The data collected should be based on your research questions. Sometimes these measures will have already been alluded to in a previous section of the test plan, such as the methodology section. You can use both performance and preference measures either quantitatively or qualitatively, depending on the test objectives. See Figure 5-8 for example measures for a test of a hotel

reservations web site.

Listing the evaluation measures you will use enables any interested parties to scan the test plan to make sure that they will be getting the type of data they expect from the test.

The following is a sample of the types of measures you might collect during a typical test.