Kimberly is a senior software tester with nearly 8 years of experience in Testing, and also added the role UX Designer to her skillset since 2020. With a Masters in Human Media Interaction, she focuses on UX Testing, and gives a Usability Testing course to her colleagues. She is leader of the UX Testing Guild at Capgemini, which aims to spread awareness amongst testers on the importance of UX Testing (e.g. Usability and Accessibility testing). She also started a chapter of Ladies that UX in Utrecht, the Netherlands which has the goal to bring the UX community in Utrecht together by providing monthly meetups where members can share their experiences. In 2022 Kimberly won the RisingSTAR award at EuroSTAR for her idea on Automatic Usability Testing.

Test professionals usually focus on working functionality and automation rather than a great user experience. According to a survey I did which 100 testers filled in, the reasons are twofold: UX is not a priority to the business, but also: Testers have not always learned how to test UX in a structured way. From experience and countless examples, we can conclude that working functionality only does not mean that the user will understand how to use your application, or they won’t get frustrated in the process. To get testers to do more UX testing, Kimberly is exploring the idea to create a tool that can automate Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics. Of course, not all of them can be automated, so the tool should also support testers to do manual UX testing. This was the idea that won the EuroSTAR 2022 RisingSTAR award, and in her talk „Mission impossible: Automatic Usability Testing“ Kimberly would like to tell you more about this idea and update you on the progress.