User Testing: A Guide to Testing At Every Stage of Digital Products
Think about what you did the last time you bought a new outfit. Something happened that spurred you into action; maybe someone raved about a brand or you picked up a new hobby and needed the gear. Perhaps you checked it out online, ended up at their retail location, tried on different styles and sizes, and took a look at the price tag to determine if you really needed it.
Last time you bought something, you may have done all of these things, or you may have done just one. Depending on what you were after, you chose from the tools in your repertoire to help you make the right decision at every stage.
Throughout every process, there are moments where we need to make a decision. At Invoke, we believe that validation with the user is important at every stage of a digital product — from ideation, to creation, to launch. At each of these stages, the way we do our research shifts and changes. By cultivating tools and processes that adjust to these steps, we can ensure our testing gets us the right type of feedback throughout a project’s lifecycle in order to make the right decisions.
At Invoke, we make use of four types of tests:
Market Validation — Making sure we’re solving the right problems
Hypothesis Validation — Reviewing ways we could potentially meet a user’s needs
Concept Validation — Confirming whether our proposed solutions meet those needs
Usability Testing — Discovering how to make the product easier to use
When used consecutively throughout a project, these tests allow us to gain learnings, make pivots and adjustments, and confidently launch new products. They work smoothly together, but they don’t rely on each other. We have fine-tuned a flexible system where each type of testing offers benefits, even when used independently. The decision about which types to utilize in a given project is made by balancing business needs and client desires with a project’s schedule, scope, and budget to identify where testing can have the most impact.
Now let’s take a look at these types and the impact they can have.
Market Validation
At the beginning of a project, you won’t always know exactly what users need, and neither may your clients, which is why they’ve come to you for help.
This is why we use Market Validation tests. By understanding the business goals and needs of our clients, we can figure out what exists in the market, how it’s being used, and who the core users are. By talking to our users and discovering who they are, we can uncover the goals, needs, frustrations and wonderment of our user base.
To gain these insights, we conduct user interviews that are based on understanding the market better. Our questions are focused on getting to know our participants and understanding their past and current behaviour within the market — uncovering information about how they use our client’s products, competitor products, and what other actions they’ve incorporated into their process.
Hypothesis Validation
Once the team has a firm idea about the problem space we’ll be operating in, it’s tempting to jump straight to producing solutions. However, the creation of early prototypes can overburden design before we are even confident in a product direction. To combat this, we practice hypothesis validation.
Based on strategic hypotheses that the team creates, we take inspirational screen grabs from competitors and comparable products and compile them into a clickable prototype that demonstrates a conceptual flow. It’s a mish-mash of different screens from different products that simulates what a user flow in a new product could potentially be. When we test these prototypes with participants, we’re looking to see how they respond to specific features, concepts, copy, and more that exist in the market. This allows us to determine whether or not our hypotheses are correct, incorrect, or need further testing — all while staying nimble and avoiding overinvesting our time and resources.
As these sessions happen in the early stages of product development, it’s also a chance to strengthen our findings on market validation. Incorporating additional, more focused questions regarding market validation helps us get an even better idea of who our users are.
Concept Validation
Now the team is ready to iterate on our solution. We create early-stage designs and mockups, all based on the validated hypotheses from our last round. These early designs — which range in fidelity from sketches to wireframes to rough UI — are representative of our product concept.
We put these in front of users to validate the direction we’re headed in, the flow of the experience, and whether users understand when and why to use the product. This information helps us assess how the product fits into the market we’re testing with and serves as an early test on our in-progress work. We think of it as a quick sense check that happens before the more in-depth and rigorous usability testing sessions that follow — though it is an opportunity to take note of potential usability issues that arise.
Usability Testing
When a high-fidelity product design is created, it’s time for a specific, granular analysis of how users think and feel when interacting with the screens, copy, components, animations, and more across the flow. Whether the product is realized as a clickable prototype in InVision or the development team has it ready and functioning on a staging site, our tests and questions will dive into the details of specific use cases.
Our goal here is to fine tune the product and make the adjustments that will ensure smooth use of the product by end users. With a few rounds of usability testing, we run through our tests and questions with a revised product to validate our updates and ensure there are no major issues remaining for launch or client handoff.
Bringing It All Together
When these testing processes are used, there’s a few things that need to be kept in mind so that we are able to get meaningful feedback while making the best use of our time. Across all types of testing, we aim to test with four to six participants per round — with five being our ideal number. No matter what you’re looking to test, this number allows you to capture a wide breadth of feedback while avoiding the diminishing returns that come with repetitive sessions.
It’s also critical to make sure you’re testing your product itself — not the peripheral tools and hardware involved. For that reason, make sure you have charged devices, power cords, plug-in mice and trackpads, and anything else that could hamper a user’s ability to use the product.
Finally, the most important thing is that you just start testing. While all four of these methods work really well when grouped with each other, introducing even one of them has the power to help you launch a more useful and beneficial product that users and businesses will love.
