User Interviews and Usability Testing
User Interviews
User Interviews are the key to investigatory research and initial discovery in the world of UX. Everyone always likes to use the term “problem solving” in their work, but at this stage we’re doing more “problem finding” rather than solving.
Why do we do User Interviews? Like I said, we do them to discover what the actual problem is that we intend to address with our designs. While you may think you know what the problem is by yourself, there are always things you didn’t think of, things your perspective makes you unable to see, or things that are important to someone coming at the issue with an entirely different frame of mind.
These interviews are a very intimate, personal, one on one conversation that helps UX researchers get to the core of user needs. It’s the “secret empathy weapon” that lets designers really get on the side of their users. Questions in interviews like these are open-ended, to let the interviewee answer completely unhindered by bias, and they enable followup questions to help get to the root of the answer. Indeed, the goal is to get a really good answer to the “why” of the problem, not just the “what.” If an answer to a question is that it was “weird,” we can ask “what made it weird?” Out of this, we’ll get much richer information on what we’re investigating.
Usability Tests
The other end of the interviewing spectrum is a Usability Test performed on a working prototype of whatever it is you’re designing. The aim of a Usability Test is a little different from an initial User Interview: while a User Interview is good for figuring out what the problem is, a Usability Test is great to see how you’re doing in solving that problem.
A key element of the Usability Test is making sure you’re testing with the right people. Ideally, you want someone who fits the demographic of the target user. The best way to do this is to recruit based on specific criteria, and the best way to do that is by writing a screener survey that easily narrows down your testing pool.
During the test, the goal is to see if your users can easily accomplish the tasks you set before them. The best way to get good results is to give good context to your task, so that your tester has a frame of reference to guide them. On top of that, you want your task to have a clear, accomplishable goal so the user knows exactly what they’re trying to do.
More often than not, you’re probably going to be surprised at the results of your Usability Tests, and not in the good way. Since everyone is coming in to your tests with different experience using technology, different backgrounds, and different needs than literally every other person, their experience is going to be different than what you expect. People may successfully complete your tasks, may take circuitous routes to get there, or may not complete the task at all.
After running your Usability Tests, you’ll have a bevy of data that will inform your next steps. The picture above summarizes the what and the why of Usability Testing as a whole. Based on your users’ results, you should emerge with good insights as to have to improve your designs in the next iteration. After all, the UX process is never really done. There are always more improvements to make and more iterations to perform. That’s the wonderful world of UX in a nutshell!
