Ben and his task based usability test!

His entrepreneurial learnings

Ben was concerned about the usability of his product. He was the co-founder of a travel booking venture that was in the process of creating a mobile app to allows customers to book and schedule their trips online.

Having quit his job at Airbnb, he was totally aware and convinced about the power of user experience. He knew users were less forgiving of poor mobile experiences. That’s why Ben firmly believed that it was important to test the usability of the mobile user experience before he started developing it.

But Ben was worried because he had never conducted usability testing by his own. He knew the basics of traditional usability testing but that is not what he could practice, because of his major constraints — budget, time and other priorities!

But Ben was an entrepreneur, and entrepreneurs never give up! 😎 He took to the internet to learn how to go about doing quick and effective user testing! And honestly, getting such tips today are only a Google search away. There are about 78,400,000 results! All that information can be overwhelming to start with :)

So after all the research here’s the plan Ben devised. You might find the research and process helpful too, for your own user test sessions!

Step 1 : Choose goal-based tasks

What should a user be able to do on your site? What are they here for?

Write down all the user goals and then pick the the top five goals you think are the most important for your users. These goals will be used as success criteria.

Step 2: Write scenarios

Once you have decided upon your top five user goals, you should create scenarios to put these tasks in a more realistic context.

A good scenario:

1. Provides context
2. Is based on a goal
3. Does not have leading or domain-specific terms

Example

Task: Find a flight from New York to London.

Scenario: Imagine you are working at New York and your native is London. It’s you sister’s wedding next week and you have to fly back to London to attend the wedding. Find out a flight for next week that flies from New York to London and book the same.

1. Provides context: “Imagine you are working at New York and your native is London”
2. Is based on a goal: “Find out a flight and book it”
3. Avoids domain-specific terms: Using domain-specific terms would lead the participant to scan for those words, instead of trying to complete a realistic task.

Step 3: Find a Location & Participants

This step depends on the choice you make — Remote user testing / Guerrilla testing / In-person testing.

Finding a location is only relevant for in-person testing. For the other two, you can totally get away with finalising the location. Remote usability testing and guerrilla testing are preferred for any company or individual who wants to get quick and cost effective validations.

For in-person testing, you need to book a quiet room to conduct your study and recruit participants.

Recruiting users for test -

The first question to answer here is how many users you should ideally have for the test. For a long time researchers thought 5 users was the ideal number. But in the last few years, there are many difference in opinions. Within our UX team, we have formulated a way to decide on the number of users. [Read this]

If you really struggling with getting users, CanvasFlip has come up with a revolutionary way of reaching out to users for UX research — Magic URL. With Magic URL you can post the link of your prototype on any social media channel or Slack groups, Whatsapp groups etc. The best part is anybody who uses your prototype from any channel gets recorded. Amazing, isn’t? If you haven’t tried this yet, I recommend you to try it out now! — Try it!

Step 4: Practice and Test!

Before the test, practice your script

We use Steve Krug’s usability testing script when we conduct tests.

Your test script should emphasise the following:

• We want to see if our site works well for users. It should take about __ minutes
• We are testing the site, and not you! Don’t worry if you make any mistakes, we’re here to learn from your experience
• You won’t hurt our feelings, our aim is to improve the site.
• Ask me if you have questions, but understand that I may not answer them immediately because we’re trying to see how you would complete these tasks if you were on your own
• We are recording the session. Only our team will see this recording

Step 5: Fix the top 3 usability problems

As you go through the usability tests with participants, the most important issues will become obvious to you. For example, if most of your participants click on the wrong button, get confused, or navigate to an incorrect page.

Write down the top 3 issues you noticed during the usability tests. (You can do this individually or with a team).

Most importantly: Make plans to fix the top 3 issues you identified!