Pros and cons of genetic testing?

What are the pros and cons of usability testing protocol like Retrospective Think Aloud ?

• What are your experience with testing protocols like CTA, RTA? Do you know any alternative?

• Answer:

  In a usability test it is quite important that you figure out what kind of tasks the user wants to accomplish on your website/ with your app etc. Although the focus is on observing what the user does rather than listening to what she says, you need to figure out what the reasons for her behavior are. Thinking aloud is just a means to find out what is going on in the user's head. From my experience the main disadvantage is that for many people verbalizing their thoughts distracts them from thinking and going on with their tasks. Also testing situations can be stressful and they might need to feel pressured to come up with reasons when actually they are just browsing and figuring out what the website is about. This is why it is especially important to give a good introduction and let them practice thinking aloud. Retrospective thinking aloud is often used with eye-tracking. Here it seems to be a good compromise. You don't want to distract the user during the test to get the most (possible) accurate eye-tracking data. It happens a lot, however, than in retrospective people cannot really remember what they thought when they were taking particular actions as clicking through the menu. Especially when testing sessions are rather long. Some usability and eye-tracking tools offer the possibility of filling out surveys in between tasks. That might be an alternative, but from my opinion a lot of useful qualitative data would be lost, when users are forced to write everything they just thought down or even answer closed questions.