



Preventing Usability Problems in the First Place

If you trace any usability problem to its inception -- the point where the problem was introduced into the design -- you'll find the same underlying cause: someone on the design team didn't have a key piece of information. Had they had that information, they would've made a different design decision. That design decision would, subsequently, have resulted in a different design -- one without the usability problem.

The most successful teams have learned that the best way to produce a usable product is to make informed decisions from the outset. They don't look at usability testing as a final validation tool. Instead, they see the technique as a method to learn the necessary information to create great designs in the first place.

What Teams Need To Learn




Moreover, you'll learn about something we don't see talked about very often -- your team: Which members come to the table with the knowledge and experience necessary to create great designs? What areas do you need to augment with more input from users? You can find out a lot about your team's strengths and weaknesses by looking for clues hidden throughout the testing process.

It Starts With Recruiting


To start the recruiting process, we need to first decide the type of user we'd like to see in our tests. Most of the time, the team isn't going to select the first folks that come along. Instead, we'll assemble the criteria for selecting participants.


To recruit participants, the team divided a list of customers and each member interviewed prospective shoppers to see if they were in the experienced category or were the less confident type. To their surprise, they discovered the more experienced shoppers favored the site, while the less confident shoppers preferred the handholding of the sales representatives. Like many such discoveries, discoveries like these feel obvious once you say them aloud, but you'd be surprised (or perhaps you wouldn't) how easily we convince ourselves of things that turn out to be just false.

Talking to candidates in the recruitment process can help answer important questions, such as: What makes a non-user not use the product? Is it because they don't need it? Or is it because it's missing some key features to make it accessible to that user? Your design decisions will change based on the outcome to those questions.


Designing Tasks Can Be Informative

In the usability study, we'll need to assign the users tasks to perform. Sometimes, we construct these tasks to ensure the users hit certain features during the session. In more exploratory testing, we'll keep the tasks more "open-ended", to encourage users to show us their overall approach to problem solving.

No matter how we construct the tasks, we have to start the same way: we need to separate the results from the process. On a travel web site, the user needs to book a flight or check the rates. However, those aren't the user's goals. The user wants to get to a meeting or wants a great vacation. Finding an affordable flight is the process to achieving the results.


To design the task, the team needs to openly discuss what the user will require to start. In testing a tax preparation application, we needed all sorts of tax-related details. Preparing the tasks required us to talk about how "messy" many users tax info can be, helping us understand how we'd deal with incomplete or conflicting information.


Participating In The Test


The biggest benefit of the usability test is it allows us to see our design through the users' eyes. When they sit in front of the design, they don't benefit from the hours of thought we've already given it. Therefore, our observation of their reaction to the design can tell us where our assumptions have led us down the wrong path.



Learning from Analyzing

25 years ago, if you asked me what the purpose of analyzing test results were, I would've told you it was to take the things we learned during the test and put them in a form the team could easily use. In other words, you learned everything you were going to learn by the time you started the analysis.

However, my experience has told me this couldn't be farther from the truth. In many projects, we start the analysis without having a clue what we've learned thus far. It isn't until we start to list all the little details, often on stickies or index cards, do we really begin to see what we've uncovered.


The same is true when analyzing the data. Sometimes, patterns emerge you couldn't see as the testing progressed. It wasn't until we had the stickies all over the wall that we noticed every user had used the same term to describe a sub-goal. It was a term we'd never used, so we noted it every time we heard it. What we didn't realize was we had actually heard it from every user. The design subsequently changed to include that term.

The most successful teams don't see usability testing as a concrete activity. They use it as an ongoing activity, through all phases of the project. From this, analyzing isn't just about looking at the results from this particular round. It's also about integrating what you learned this time with what you've learned in the past. Seeing the testing results as an ever-growing library of knowledge is an extremely effective approach.

Get More from Your User Research Analysis

If you're looking to make the most of the data you get from user research, you'll want to sign-up for our next UIE Virtual Seminar with Steve Portigal - User Research Analysis Techniques. Steve will show your team how to take the information you're gathering and take productive steps to moving your design decisions forward. Learn more about the webinar.

Share Your Thoughts with Us

Have you learned important things from your tests? We'd love to hear your insights. Join in on the discussion over at the UIE Brain Sparks blog

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