Usability Testing, goodbye Personas
If you have been learning about software development, you would come to learn about Personas. Those boxes with pictures of fictitious(or not?) persons with likes and dislikes, etc. Now confession time, if you’re like me (and most people) you will find Personas a bit of, lacking. As in it seems like the effort you put in to doesn’t seem to be worth on the end. If you told this to a master of Personas, the pros of the field, they would scuff and told you “Ha, you’re just using them wrong. Don’t worry it’s just a common pitfall people fell when using Personas. Unlike me, I mastered it, molded by it, born by it”. Well if it is a “common pitfall”, instead of mastering the ways of the pros and grows a beard, why not switch for an alternative solution? This is Usability Testing.
What is Usability Testing?
Usability Testing is a UX research methodology to seek out problems users found when using a UX design. It is done by creating a UX design, ask a sample of users to test it, observe, fix the problems, test it again and the iteration continues. Unlike Personas where the development team thinks what will the user do, Usability Testing test with the real users directly and reveal problems from real users.
How to do a Usability Testing?
First, define the problem. Seek out what features you want your software to do and create the first implementation of it.
Second, pick up a sample of users to test. Pick a sample from your target users to test your UX implementation. Rule of thumb, pick at maximum 5 people for one test iteration. Why 5? because more than 5 may lead to a point of diminishing return. As you test your UX design to your test users, most of the problem you found on the first test user, will come out again on the next one, on so forth to the last, meaning every test user you test it, the fewer new problems you found until it reach a point where you wouldn’t found new problems and keep getting the same problems from before. In practice, 5 is a good number to go.
Third, test and observe. After picking up your test users, give them the software and ask them to do the features you want to test. Observe them, note down what troubles them down, which part did they got stuck on, which design confuses them, ask them how they find the design, etc.
Fourth, list down the results and start tinkering solutions. After observing them and note down the problems you found, go back to the desk and start writing up solutions for them. This new UX design will be our new iteration.
Fifth, repeat. After creating a new iteration of UX design, repeat the cycle. Wrote down the problems you want to test, test, and so on. The amount of iteration is up to you, according to your budget or what you think is a nice amount.
Some tips from The Father of Usability Testing, Jakob Nielsen
- The rule of thumb is 5 people for each iteration, but it doesn’t have to be that all the time. There are certain scenarios you would need more or less than 5. Example if your team is slow, maybe they need to get approval from multiple divisions before you run a usability test iteration, you may add more user in an iteration, since that way at least you get more problems to find in one iteration before you can get to the next iteration, but if your team is fast, you may use less than 5 users for an iteration. The reason is with a fast moving team, you could get faster improvement.
- You don’t have to fix all the problems you found in an iteration. The reasoning is when you try to fix problems, sometimes there are problems that we aren’t even sure if there is a solution to it, or maybe a solution for a problem may introduce a new problem later on. Rather than wasting your time trying to fix those problems, just leave them be and continue on to the next iteration. By continuing, we can get new problems we can better solve and receive actual improvements.
So is this it for Personas?
Well even though Usability Testing seems more promising (and in my honest opinion, it is), I wouldn’t say we shouldn’t forget Personas immediately. Sure Usability Testing is the newer practice people use and more and more people started to drop Personas from their development, but I say we could get the principles from Personas and apply them to Usability Testing to better improve our Usability Testing.
The main goal of creating Personas is to identify and differentiate our target users so we can better design a UX design that can satisfy all of them. In Usability Testing, we don’t do the differentiating, instead we observe from our test users and retrieve the needs to satisfy them in hopes that those small sample may represent our whole target users. So when picking our test users, it is best to pick a high variants of users. With a wide variants of test users, we have a higher chance to found more new problems. In doing so we can hopefully represent all of the different groups in our target users and satisfy their needs.
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