How we used Asana to run user interviews and usability tests
Scheduling sessions, organizing meeting spaces, creating notes, and making sure we have all the right paper work are only few of the tasks that need to be completed as you prepare to conduct usability testing and user interviews.
We highly recommend using Asana along with the Google integration to keep constant and efficient scheduling for usability and user interview sessions. Asana is a flexible tool that can easily adapt to our user research needs. By planning our user research sessions in Asana, the team had full clarity on the session, milestones, session dates, with document integration and communication in one place.
1. Use ‘Add due dates’ and ‘Sync to Calendar’ for organizing participant sessions
As we learned, scheduling sessions is a huge task for making user research happen. Between everyone’s busy schedule, you want to make sure that you are on the ball with managing follow-up emails, booking rooms and ensuring all those scheduling details are clear to your participant and your team. With the ‘Sync to Calendar’ option, we were able to add our participants session time in one place and also have it synced to our group Gmail calendar.
2. Attach individual participant’s note-taking Google doc for easy access on the day of the session
No matter how organized you are, unforeseen logistical issues come up — with either yourself running late or the participant arriving to the session later than expected, you don’t want to have to go to multiple places to get the documents you need to facilitate your session. By using ‘Add from Google Drive,’ you can ensure that any reference documents you need, like your note-taking sheet, are at the ready the moment you arrive to the session, simply by opening Asana.
3. Use sections to organize before, during and after session tasks
To keep organizational efforts standardized, we broke down the session into tasks that need to be completed before the session such as confirming date, time and location; during, such as getting the consent form signed; and after, such as getting the user to fill out a Product Reaction Form and filling in our Themes Sheet.
We also included sections of the usability test as tasks in Asana, such as introductions, usability tasks, wrap-up and discussion, to help keep the facilitator on track and ensure consistency between tests. This allowed us to track progress on session milestones in real time.
4. Assign session roles to team members
For all our sessions, we had 2 roles — a facilitator who walks the participant through the tasks and questions, and a notetaker who observes the participant’s behaviour and comments and captures it in notes in a Google doc. As a big part of this project for us is the learning experience, this feature helped us ensure that we all got a chance to execute and learn from both roles.
Tracking our user research in Asana gave our team clarity on priorities, milestones and progress. When the team can see goals, expectations, and session deadlines, it’s easier to stay on track so we can focus on engaging with participants and gaining meaningful insights.
