Comparison of CTA and Textual Feedback in Usability Testing for Malaysian Users

Usability moderators found that the concurrent think-aloud (CTA) method has some cultural limitation that impacts usability testing with Malaysian users. This gives rise to proposing a new method called textual feedback. The research question is to determine whether there are any differences in terms of usability defects found by employing the new method. Due to the high power distance, it is hypothesized that the CTA method may not be sufficient and hence a textual feedback method is recommended instead. Hence, the objective of this study is to determine if there are any differences in usability defects from the concurrent think-aloud (CTA) method (Condition 2) and textual feedback method (Condition 1) within the same group of Malaysian users. A pair-wise t-test was used, whereby users were subjected to performing usability task using both methods. Results reveal that we can reject the null hypothesis of "no difference" in feedback and therefore conclude that textual feedback reported significantly more usability defects than CTA, as the difference is positive t(208) = 4.791, p=0.01.