Guerilla User-Testing

Learn how qualitative methods and early testing can lift your product to the next level

When creating new products, be it apps or websites early feedback is the most important thing. A common advice is to “get out of the building” and this is surely one of the best things you can do to improve your product and its user-experience. Nearly nowhere this is done on a regular basis, I recommend a minimum of 5 qualitativ user-interviews per month, no matter which product — there are no excuses.

But before I come to some details regarding qualitative user-testing let’s go one step back. What is user-testing all about? Getting feedback for your product! In lean-startup settings it is always recommended to get feedback even for prototypes that are done in a very quick and dirty way. Rightly so, but I want to stress something even more extreme: Get feedback every second you work on a UX-problem, no matter how small it seems. Simply don’t work alone on sketches. Have some partner, scribble, talk about your ideas, re-sketch, improve. And, surprisingly, even at the first steps involve your CEO and designer, if you got one. The feedback and ideas they can give in the early scribble-sessions will save you a lot of time and interations when you discuss the final design, because now everybody was part in the earliest steps in the process. Also, by not sketching alone you will easily generate a lot more ideas than a single Product Manager could ever have. Good Product Managers know that there should be no ownership of ideas and their job is NOT to have the best ideas for their product (they should have some, of course). Their job is to ensure the best ideas are found and make their way into the final product! So, drop your vanity, don’t present final sketches to anyone but start with group-feedback from the first second.

When you have come up with something that everyone in your sketching-group is happy about, it is time to get out of the building. Keep in mind that for one webpage a complete wireframe for external user-testing should be feasible in one day if you meet, scribble and decide in the morning and out of this create a somewhat polished wireframe in the afternoon. Now given one such wireframe, how do you get most out of user-feedback?

The first rule is: there are no rules. Go out of the building, show your wireframe around and get feedback. It really does not matter so much HOW you do it, it matters far more THAT you do it. Talk to people in your coffee-shop, on public transport, just on the street, everywhere. Do it! The first interviews will feel very awkward, but you will quickly learn to enjoy them. In my experience you will always find some points to think about that did not came to your mind before. That is the whole point of guerilla user testing. Only very rarely your interview-partners will present you new ideas or directly improve your product. In the usual case they will be stuck at some point or spot an error that you never thought about. And if more than 5 people found the same error, you can be quite sure you found something important.

Is there anything else to say about how to get good feedback? If you really want to go deeper, here are some points that could help you, but the main point is really to talk to strangers on a regular basis. Here is my advice for doing helpful user-testing:

1. Offer a small and nice incentive (coffee, brownie, not more than 5 € value needed)
2. Make the paricipants “think loud”
3. Plan for less than 10 minutes, participants can leave any time they want
4. Tell the participants you are testing a prototype, not them. The more errors they make, the better (But they should act naturally, of course).
5. Set a story first, ask open questions first, let the participants play
6. Give more precise tasks towards the end.
7. Some things can’t be expressed well with words. Have a paper and a pen at hand.
8. Target different genders, different types of people.
9. Don’t answer, don’t lead. When participant’s are confused, ask about their confusion, ask what they would do.
10. Make notes, be in teams of 2 people, one takes notes. (errors + also what works well)
11. When people are not talking enough, ask questions like these:

• What are you currently thinking?
• Describe the steps your are going through
• What do you think will/should happen next
• Is that what you expected? Was that confusing?