Hacker's guide to user testing.

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Hacker’s guide to user testing Tom Alterman @tomalterman

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Who am I? UX & Front-end Lead at TrialReach

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Who am I? Currently doing two people’s jobs* *please come take one oﬀ me www.trialreach.com

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User testing Makes sure we are working on the next most important task

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Why people don’t do it • “Takes too long” • “Too expensive” • “Too diﬃcult”

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Why people don’t do it “That’s not my job”

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Hard lesson learnt Business requirement: “Must be able to tweet every piece of content on the site”

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Hard lesson learnt Functional requirement: SOCIAL BUTTONS EVERYWHERE!!!!

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Hard lesson learnt • Took a week to build • Horrible hacky code • Added ~1 sec to page load

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Hard lesson learnt Did user testing at the end of development

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Hard lesson learnt No one used this feature

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Hard lesson learnt Example URL: http://www.***.com/articles/ada_178354/silversky- acquisition-complete?from=homepage- rzz&_afrLoop=550888908964000&_afrWindowMode=0&_afr WindowId=cc87g22wh_1#!%40%40%3F_afrWindowId %3Dcc87g22wh_1%26_afrLoop %3D550888908964000%26from%3Dhomepage-rzz %26_afrWindowMode%3D0%26_adf.ctrl-state %3Dcc87g22wh_61

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Hard lesson learnt Clean URLs was not considered an essential task

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Hard lesson learnt • Horrible code • Didn’t solve user need • We felt like idiots

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The process 1. Recruit participants 2. Plan & run the sessions 3. Analyse the ﬁndings

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Finding people Most time consuming & daunting part of the process

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Test with real users Other people on your team don’t count

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Reach out to the target audience • Your site • Emails • Social media / forums • Gumtree / Craigslist

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Oﬀer to pay them Everyone wants a £20 Amazon voucher

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Test users remotely Easier to recruit and run sessions

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Use a short survey Helps you ensure they are relevant users

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Ethnio will do this all for you Helps you ensure they are relevant users

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Call those you think eligible Allows you to check they are not weirdos or scammers

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3-5 users per test 5 users will help you ﬁnd over 80% of the usability issues* *http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-many-test-users/

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Go buy this book!

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Prepare a test script See an example: http://bit.ly/testingscript

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Use GoToMeeting for testing Grudgingly its easiest for anyone to install and share their screen

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Act like a therapist • Observe • Don’t interrupt • No leading questions

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Ask questions like: What are you thinking?

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Ask questions like: What would you do next?

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Ask questions like: What do you think just happened?

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At the end of each session Write a quick list of the most important things you noticed

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Look for the patterns 3 users - URGENT!

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Look for the patterns 2 users - Important

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Look for the patterns 1 user - Interesting

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Share ﬁndings with your team • Urgent issues • Quick wins • Future considerations