Usability Testing from home

How to best keep up the Usability Testing working from home?

At ice, like most other places, we have found ourselves at our home offices for a prolonged length of time. And despite the pandemic we did more usability testing the last 6 months than we have done in the previous year. What happened?

Before the pandemic we built a brand new Mobile Usability Lab, to be able to use it anywhere according to our way of work. But now, our Mobile Usability Test Lab is collecting dust in a locker back at the office. Like a relic of ancient times, even though it was built just 10 months before all this happened.

The ice Mobile Usability Lab

We buckled up and researched for solutions to deal with the new digital daily life. We found some options we wanted to try. All of them fully digital.

Moderated Usability testing

This is how we ideally want to conduct our Usability testing, and there were several options we looked at. The one that stood out were the Lookback solution supported by Norstat, who also conduct the recruiting of test users for us on a daily basis.

Mockup from recorded video in Lookback.

But that was not where we started off…

Unmoderated Usability testing

We had a deal with Teston, who gave us a free test. We did a trial test of a product we just released. While we were a bit sceptic to this kind of testing, it proved to be a great way to test smaller tasks and flows. Especially testing prototypes, where the test user don’t have to use a lot of test user data, proved to work just perfectly. Keeping in mind we test Mobile first.

Mockup from the recorded videos from Teston.

The downside is of course that the test user might misunderstand the task given, and we’re not able to correct the user. But that is totally up to the structuring of the questions to make sure the given tasks are crystal clear.

So what if I have limited budget?

So these two options , Lookback and Teston, were tried and tested, but then we decided that we needed to test a more informal platform to do usability testing on internal newly appointed employees. We were building a quite experimental new way of buying our products, and we wanted to test it on people who were not colored by our way of working yet, and keep the testing in-house and not spill out company secrets.

Testing through Teams

Yes, it was not streamlined, but i worked fine. We felt we were doing a usability test as much on the Teams structure as we were testing our new product. But we did a lot of interesting findings and found lots to iterate on and improve. It was quite an eyeopening way of structuring our way of testing.

Ramp up your user feedback!

So if you have a hypotheses then try this out; Trow it first out on your companies newbies. Especially the ones who don’t know the industry.

Iterate, and then do an unmoderated usability test through Teston, Maze or any other platform you could think of, with external testers. What makes Teston great is that they also do the recruiting for you, but if you have a base of test users available then Maze might be the way to go.

Testing from home has never been easier.

So two iterations in, you would want to do a moderated standard usability test, right? Get a hold on Lookback, or talk to your local recruitment partner to see if they have a platform they support.

Now you get your proper usability test, from your basement, and are able to conduct a proper temperature check on your hypotheses.

So the final line is…

Don’t settle for doing nothing, there are so many different ways of collecting your user research and testing your hypotheses. So many great digital solutions at hand. It’s all really about your imagination.

Go get some user insight!