Usability
Testing
Time
⏲
4-11 Days
Difficulty
đź•ą
Medium
Materials
📦
Recording equipment
Spreadsheet to track responses
Incentives
People
đź•´
2 Reserachers
3-5 Users (3x)
Overview
Usability testing – a researcher asks a participant to perform tasks with a prototype of the product, and then observes behavior and listens for feedback.
What
Examples of field studies include:
- Flexible user tests in the field, which combine usability testing with adaptive interviews—adapting your questions as you learn in the field.
- Customer visits can help you better understand issues that arise in particular industry or business contexts or those that appear at a certain scale.
- Direct observation is useful for conducting design research into user processes, for instance to help create natural task flows for subsequent paper prototypes. Direct observation is also great for learning user vocabulary, understanding businesses’ interaction with customers, and discovering common workarounds.
- Ethnographic research situates you in the users’ context as a member of the group. Group research allows you to gain insight into mental models and social situations that can help products and services fit into people’s lives. This type of research is particularly helpful when you target audience lives in a culture different than yours.
- Contextual inquiry is a method that structures and combines many of these field-study activities.
Why
Examples of field studies include:
- Flexible user tests in the field, which combine usability testing with adaptive interviews—adapting your questions as you learn in the field.
- Customer visits can help you better understand issues that arise in particular industry or business contexts or those that appear at a certain scale.
- Direct observation is useful for conducting design research into user processes, for instance to help create natural task flows for subsequent paper prototypes. Direct observation is also great for learning user vocabulary, understanding businesses’ interaction with customers, and discovering common workarounds.
- Ethnographic research situates you in the users’ context as a member of the group. Group research allows you to gain insight into mental models and social situations that can help products and services fit into people’s lives. This type of research is particularly helpful when you target audience lives in a culture different than yours.
- Contextual inquiry is a method that structures and combines many of these field-study activities.
When
Use this methodology once you have a working prototype and are ready to test it, with plenty of time allowed for feedback and fixes.
In usability testing, the plan is to test on a minimum of 5 people in order to identify problems.
In iterative usability testing, the plan is to have 3 rounds of interviews (3-4 participants each time), with time for team fixes in between each round.
Your mottos should be:
- “What’s the smallest change we can make that might solve this?”
- “Better Now” instead of “Perfect Later” (you’ll be back next month or even next week)
Steps
Step 1 Make a research plan
1. Write a test task protocol.
The tasks in a usability test are realistic activities that the participant might perform in real life. They can be very specific or very open-ended, depending on the research questions and the type of usability testing.
Examples:
- Your printer is showing “Error 5200”. How can you get rid of the error message?
- You’ve been told you need to speak to Tyler Smith from the Project Management department. Use the intranet to find out where they are located. Tell the researcher your answer.
Task wording is very important in usability testing. Small errors in the phrasing of a task can cause the participant to misunderstand what they’re asked to do or can influence how participants perform the task (a psychological phenomenon called priming).
Step 2 Ready your participants
2. Recruit 3-4 people to participate in individual usability testing sessions with you in person or remotely via Zoom.
The participant should be an actual user, or one who matches the criteria of your user persona.
The facilitator works to ensure that the test results in high-quality, valid data, without accidentally influencing the participant’s behavior.
Verbally read task instructions to the participant, or hand them to the participant on a paper (one per task, so follow-up tasks aren’t revealed ahead of time). It helps to ask participants to read the task instructions out loud. This ensures that the participant reads the instructions completely, and helps the researchers with their note-taking, because they always know which task the user is performing.
Also ask participants to think out loud during usability testing. When they narrate their actions and thoughts as they perform tasks, it provides insight to their behaviors, goals, thoughts, and motivations.
(In remote unmoderated testing, an application may perform some of the facilitator’s roles.)
Step 3 Log and Process
As a team, identify the top 3 issues overall.
Step 4 Follow-up and Learn More
Fix them.
Step 5 Analyze and share
Repeat steps 1-4
Step 6 Analyze and share
You can write a 1-page bullet-point report if you want to. But your primary deliverable is a corrected prototype.
Tools
None