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We have two three four tags, , , and . The tag wiki for testing is a technique used to evaluate a product by testing it on users making it clearly about Usability Testing.

All of these fall under User Research. The latter three have been used specifically for usability studies. There definitely needs to be some merges/aliases here.

Which tags are distinct and which should be the master tag(s)? IMO all except User Research need to be combined into a single tag regarding usability studies. I'm less sure whether User Research should be used as a separate but more general tag to include things like Card Sorting that aren't really usability studies. But we definitely don't need all 4 of these, do we?

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Testing is (or rather should be) separate to usability-testing. The wiki text for it is wrong IMO, but testing itself would encompass more than just usability: It is system testing, user-acceptance testing, unit testing, automated testing... although not all specifically associated to UX it is still a recognised term. It is probably being used against the wrong questions here.

My personal opinion is that they are distinct enough terms to warrant separate tags, but we may need to go through and clean up which questions are associated to which tag, and rewrite some of the wiki text.

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  • IMO just "testing" shouldn't be used for any of those questions, it's an ambiguous tag and there are better, specific tags. It's not so much a recognized term as an ambiguous, generic term. What would just "testing" be used for? What about usability testing vs studies?
    – Zelda Mod
    Commented Aug 17, 2012 at 16:29
  • It's a fair point that testing can also mean other kinds of 'can we break your software' testing (eg load testing, functionality testing). I guess it depends on a UX board whether when people choose testing they are talking about anything other than usability testing.
    – PhillipW
    Commented Aug 24, 2012 at 9:32
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I think that usability-study and usability-testing need to be merged. User research is a much broader term and can include etnographic studies, observations, interviews, surveys and all manner of research techniques which aren't usability studies. Testing is just too generic and these questions should be retagged to something more specific.

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  • Agreed on all points, but Testing is too widespread to manually retag. Personally I think we should merge into usability-study/usability-testing without making them a synonym
    – Zelda Mod
    Commented Aug 18, 2012 at 16:43

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