Proven Strategies To Improve Usability Studies
Usability testing is the process of figuring out how well a product or service works by having real users try it out. Testers are usually asked to complete tasks while researchers watch, listen, and take notes.
With the following tips, you can get most out of the usability studies.
1. Ask situation-specific questions
The first step in determining if a product is intuitive enough is to have testers use it in hypothetical settings similar to those in which it would actually be utilized.
Say, your product is a mobile app that helps users schedule appointments with doctors. You’ve added a new feature to the app in which users can type in their symptoms and get a recommendation for a doctor accordingly.
A bad prompt: Go to the ‘search by symptoms’ section, type in stomach ache, find it from the list of symptoms, and find gastroenterologists.
A good prompt: You have a stomach ache and you don’t know what doctor you should see. Try to find a doctor who can help you through the app.
Let’s see the problem with the first one. You should not provide users step-by-step instructions if you want to measure the app’s intuitiveness, but rather see how they would act if they were in a situation in which this feature could be a lifesaver.
2. Prepare prompts based on your research goals
To acquire the best outcomes from the study, you must first set clear goals and expectations. Why are you conducting this research?
To measure how user friendly is the app?
To collect ideas to improve the usability?
To see what people think about certain features?
Write them down and make sure your prompts and questions are tailored to your goals.
Say, you have conducted a quantitative research and decided to develop a new feature based on the results. Now, you want to test if it is user-friendly enough to launch.
What you SHOULD NOT ask
Do you find this feature useful?
Sounds like an adequate question, doesn’t it? If so, what is wrong with asking this question?
Remember the goal of the study? You are not conducting this study to understand if people need it or not: you have done this research earlier. Moreover, the answer to this question should come from quantitative research, not usability testing. In this particular study your goal is to find out if it is easy to use or not.
What you SHOULD ask
On a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being extremely difficult and 10 being a no brainer, how easy/difficult was it to complete this task?
3. Ask testers to think out loud
It may sound weird at first, but you will see why it makes sense. Asking users to explain their decision-making processes can be a game changer in enhancing the user experience. Let’s say during the usability test you asked the user to change their username and narrate what they think throughout the process.
A sample answer:
“Well, if I want to change my name, I go to my profile, obviously. I look at the right top corner first, because usually the profile icon is there. Not, it is not there. I look at the side bar. Yes, it is on the left bottom just like Twitter. I click on it, but I cannot see the edit option. I guess it should be somewhere in the settings. There it is! Well, I have changed. Hmm. I guess it is automatically saved, but I don’t see where I can save changes.”
What can we learn from this particular experience?
- They expect the editing option to be available when clicking the profile.
- They expect profile being on the right top corner.
- They expect some signifier to let them know how to save changes or that their changes are saved automatically.
We could guess some parts just observing them completing tasks, but there are always a more complex thought process behind their actions that we do not have access to.
4. Do not help
When you assign a task to a user and they can’t figure out how to do it, that’s a red flag. What you should not do in this scenario is assist them in completing the task. Instead, consider asking the following questions:
- How would you expect to get there?
- Where would you expect the change button to be?
5. Do not be friendly
It is always nice to be friendly, isn’t it? Well, it is not. There is a reason. You may have heard about different kinds of biases. One of them is friendliness bias.
Friendliness bias occurs when the users providing feedback tell you the answers they think you want to hear. The tester may often withhold their critical comments if you are overly nice to them so as not to offend you. Try to be neutral to avoid friendliness bias to get in your way!
Disclaimer: do not be rude either! It won’t help you to get constructive feedback.
Bonus tip: Ask another person to do the interview
If you have enough resources, try to ask or hire someone else to do the usability interview for you and participate as an observer. When we are testing our own product, we tend to explain things when testers misunderstand how a product is meant to be used. A neutral person, on the other hand, is more open-minded and will do a better job of receiving feedback and coming up with an insightful action plan.
Thanks for reading! Share in the comments if you find these tips useful.
