This accident was one of more than 250 related to confusion over the design of the Jeep’s gearshift. Many people thought the Fiat Chrysler gearshift, which looked like most gearshifts, should move up and down to shift into reverse, drive and park. That was their mental model. In other words, their belief about how it should work.

The gearshift, in fact, worked differently than most. It used push-buttons and always returned to the centre position. The fact that the gearshift’s actual functionality – otherwise known as its  “conceptual model” – was different than users’ mental models caused issues. Major ones in this instance.

In the field of user experience, we need to understand how users think so we can design with that in mind. When we understand people’s thinking, we can either design to match their current mental models, that is their beliefs about how things should work. Or, we can clearly educate people about anything that might differ from their expectations. We know this is critical to creating usable products.

This article will walk you through how to apply this idea to your own designs, covering:

• how to understand your users’ mental models in relation to your product
• how to represent them so the design team can keep those findings in mind
• how to translate what you know into designs that will work.

Let’s get started.

Understanding users’ mental models

The first step in understanding our users’ mental models is (unsurprisingly) research. Many research techniques such as interviews, observation and focus groups help us understand how users think about the world and products like ours. Let’s look at interviews as an example.

You’ll want to interview several users who have similar characteristics; in other words, those who you think are likely to use your product in a similar way. In an example from my past, my email marketing firm had a lot of users who were small business owners who didn’t have much time for marketing.

Some of our goals for the interviews were:

• to understand why they were doing newsletters
• how they created them
• pain points they encountered with our system
• how they wanted to feel when sending messages.

All of this would teach us about they understood the world of email marketing.

Write down whatever you want to learn and then come up with open-ended questions for your interviews. Start each interview with easy questions to make your participants feel comfortable, then move on to those that require deeper thinking. There are plenty of resources for tips on interviewing users. As a start, take a look at Cameron Rogers’ article right here on UX Mastery, or Steve Portigal’s book, Interviewing Users.

If you’re observing people work or conducting a focus group, it’s still helpful to determine ahead of time what you want to learn, which will help you focus your session.

Once you’ve completed your research, you should have a good idea of common themes, and how they experience your product and other similar products.

When I interviewed small business owners, I learned, for example, that they generally created their newsletters bit by bit because they were interrupted a lot. I also learned they were trying to stay on their customers’ minds, had lots of pain points with our system (things that didn’t work the way they expected or needed them to), and they wanted to feel smart and confident when sending their messages.

Representing mental models

By now, you’re starting to form a good understanding of this user group. Your next job is to put this information into a format that will help your designers consider these users’ mindsets. Again, you have several options, including personas, storyboards and mental model mapping. Let’s talk through how to use personas to represent mental models.

In my example, one finding was that the business owners had a mental model based on using Microsoft Word. They thought they could walk away from their work and return to work on it where they left off. In their work as small business owners, they often did need to step away frequently.

Unfortunately, this conflicted with the way our product – or conceptual design – actually worked. If you left for “too long” and the system shut down, you navigated to another page, you lost your work.  This caused much pain for users, who were devastated over losing their work. This even happened the usability testing environment test when it wasn’t even their work.

Our persona, Bob the Busy Business Owner, conveyed that there was a mismatch between the persona’s expectation and the software’s reality. The team then needed to decide whether to address this mismatch by meeting Bob’s expectation or by explaining the different model and how the interface worked.

When you create your personas, consider conveying their mental models – their beliefs about how a system will work – in the form of their current work habits, product expectations, issues, and quotes.

One quote that helped describe our Bob persona’s system expectation, for example, was “I need something where I can just plop in my copy and it works.” That helps the team understand that he’s busy, in a hurry, and in need of something that doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge and fuss. In design discussions, make sure designers keep the personas in mind and address their needs. 

Instead of personas, you might decide to create storyboards or maps because you want to represent your users’ mental models more visually, or focus more on illustrating their ideal interactions with your product. That works too.

Creating conceptual models using mental models

And now the final step: applying what you know about your users to the design. In this case, it made sense to make the software match Bob’s expectation because he was in a hurry and not technologically advanced. It was important to prevent such critical errors. So that was our strategy.

The designers and developers worked together to create a system that automatically saved users’ work frequently, helping Bob to achieve his goal of feeling confident about his newsletters. To test how well this and other new design changes matched our users’ mental models, we usability-tested each iteration of the design and made modifications where needed.

When you understand how your users think, you can create intuitive designs for them. It just makes sense. If Fiat Chrysler had stuck with designing for a well-established mental model instead of veering in a different direction, the world would be a safer place today.

Up for some further reading? Here are more useful resources on mental models.

Books:

• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
• Designing with the Mind in Mind, Second Edition by Jeff Johnson
• Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, by Indi Young

Online Articles:

• Mental Models by Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group
• The Secret to Designing an Intuitive UX by Susan Weinschenk, UX Magazine
• User Experience Design with Mental Models by Ross Johnson, 3.7 Designs Blog

The post Communicating Mental Models to Your Team appeared first on UX Mastery.

To move from your research findings to product changes, you should set yourself two main goals.

First, to effectively communicate your findings to help your audience process them and focus on next steps.

Secondly, to follow through by proactively working with stakeholders to decide which issues will be addressed and by whom, injecting yourself into the design process whenever possible. This follow-through is critical to your success.

Let’s look at an end-to-end process for embracing these two main goals.

Effectively communicating your findings

Finding focus

When you have important study results, it’s exciting to share the results with your team and stakeholders. Most likely, you’ll be presenting a lot of information, which means it could take them a while to process it and figure out how to proceed. If your audience gets lost in details, there’s a high risk they’ll tune out.

The more you can help them focus and stay engaged, the more likely you are to get results. You might even consider having a designer or product owner work with you on the presentation to help ensure your results are presented effectively – especially if your associates were involved in the research process.

Engaging with your colleagues and stakeholders

You should plan to present your results in person – whether it’s a casual or formal setting – rather than simply writing up a report and sending it around. This way, your co-workers are more likely to absorb and address your findings.

You could present formally to your company’s leadership team if the research will inform a key business decision. Or gather around a computer with your agile teammates to share results that inform specific design iterations. Either way, if you’re presenting – especially if you allow for questions and discussion – you’re engaging with your audience. Your points are getting across and design decisions will be informed.

Why presentations matter

Here are a few ways your presentation can help your team focus on what to do with the findings:

• Prioritise your findings (Critical, High, Medium, Low). This helps your audience focus on what’s most important and chunk what should be done first, second and so on. An issue that causes someone to fail at an important task, for example, would be rated as critical. On the other hand, a cosmetic issue or a spelling issue would be considered minor. Take both the severity and frequency of the issue into consideration when rating them. Remember to define your rating scale. Usability.gov has a good example. Other options are to use a three-question process diagram, a UX integration matrix (great for agile), or the simple but effective MoSCoW method.  
  
• Develop empathy by sharing stories. We love to hear stories, and admire those among us who can tell the best ones. In the sterile, fact-filled workplace, stories can inspire, illuminate and help us empathise with those we’re designing for. Share the journeys your participants experienced, the challenges they need to overcome. Use a sprinkling of drama to illustrate the stakes involved; understanding the implications will help moderate the conversations and support UX decisions moving forward.
• Illustrate consequences and benefits. Your leadership team will be interested if they know they will lose money, customers, or both if they don’t address certain design issues. Be as concrete as you can, using numbers from analytics and online studies when possible to make points. For example, you might be able to use analytics to show users getting to a key page, and then dropping off. This is even more effective if you can show via an online study that one version of a button, for example, is effective all the time, whereas the other one is not understood.
  
• Provide design recommendations. Try to strike a balance between too vague and too prescriptive. You want your recommendations to be specific and offer guidance about how an interaction should be designed, without actually designing it. For example, you could say “consider changing the link label to match users’ expectations” or “consider making the next step in the process more obvious from this screen.” These are specific enough to give direction and serve as a jumping off point for designers.
  
• Suggest next steps. It can help stakeholders to see this in writing, especially if they’re not used to working with a UX team. For example:
  • Meet to review and prioritise the findings.
  • Schedule the work to be done.
  • Assign the work to designers.

Presentations are an important first step, but your job as a researcher doesn’t end there. Consider your presentation an introduction to the issues that were found, and a jumping-off point for informing design plans.

The proactive follow through

You’ve communicated the issues. Now it’s time to dig in and get results.

Getting your priorities straight

Start by scheduling a discussion with your product manager – and possibly a representative each from the development and design teams – to prioritise the results, and put them on the product roadmap. It can be useful to take your user research findings – especially from a larger study – and group them together into themes, or projects.

Next, rate the projects on a grid with two axes. For example:

• how much of a problem it is for customers could display vertically; and
• how much effort it would be to design or redesign it (small, medium and large) could display horizontally.

Placing cards or sticky notes that represent the projects along these axes helps you see which work would yield the most value

Then compare this mapping to what’s currently on the product roadmap and determine where your latest projects fit into the overall plans. Consider that it often makes more sense to fix what’s broken in the existing product – especially if there are big problems – than to work on building new features. Conducting this and additional planning efforts together will ensure everyone is on the same page.

Working with your design team

Once it’s time for design work, participate in workshops and other design activities to represent the product’s users and ensure their needs are understood. In addition to contributing to the activities at hand, your role is to keep users’ goals and design issues top of mind.

Since the focus of the workshop – or any design activity – early on is solving design problems, it could be useful to post the design problems and/or goals around the room, along with user quotes and stories. A few copies of complete study findings in the room, plus any persona descriptions, are useful references. The workshop to address design problems could be handled several ways – storyboarding solutions, drawing and discussing mockups, brainstorming. But the goal is to agree on problems you’re trying to solve, and come up with possible solutions to solve them.

As the design team comes up with solutions, remember to iteratively test them with users. It’s useful for designers to get regular feedback to determine whether they’re improving their designs, and to get answers to new design questions that arise throughout the process. All of this helps designers understand users and their issues and concerns.

Achieving your end game

One key to getting your results implemented is simply remembering to consider stakeholders’ goals and big picture success throughout the research and design process. The best way to do this is to include them in the research planning – and in the research observations – to make sure you’re addressing their concerns all along. When presenting, explain how the results you are suggesting will help them meet their design and business goals.

Always remember that as the researcher you hold knowledge about your users that others don’t. Representing them from the presentation through the next design iteration is one key to your product’s success.

How do you make sure your hard-won research insights makes it through to design? Leave a comment or share in our forums.

Catch up with more of our latest posts on UX research:

• Pivot or persevere? Find out using lean experiments
• Making an impact with UX research insights
• The researcher’s journey: leveling up as a user researcher

The post How to Turn UX Research Into Results appeared first on UX Mastery.

What’s going on?

If your stakeholders aren’t showing interest in your work, there’s a good chance you haven’t sufficiently included them in the UX design process, or are failing to engage them appropriately.

These leaders often have years of experience and vast knowledge of the company’s products and customers – and their own ideas about how things should be done. Yet many young UX teams work in isolation, not realising the importance of involving the rest of the organisation.

Learning how to work with your stakeholders – especially the decision makers – is a critical skill. Without it, it’s very possible your UX team won’t be around long.

In this article, I’ll take you through three key things you can do to get in sync with your stakeholders.

Show them the value

People in charge of financial decisions need to be convinced that UX is a good investment of their time and money.

They need to see that improving key usability problems will give them a measurable return on their investment. Like reducing calls to support, increasing customer retention and conversions, and reducing development re-work (because you’re making good decisions to do it right the first time).

Show them that UX works and how you can be of value.

Here are a few ideas for quickly showing value.

• Share case studies from companies where improving the UX has made a big difference to the bottom line. This helps your co-workers see the big picture and how other companies have seen real value. EConsultancy is a great source of case studies from different industries – try searching for UX case studies on the site. UX Mastery is also in the process of collecting and publishing some useful stories (keep your eyes peeled!).

• Talk with your customer support and sales teams to understand which product issues make customers leave, or are a barrier to signing up for products in the first place. Armed with this information, find low-hanging fruit – the big problems that might be fixed fairly easily. Re-design and test the feature. Share the usability testing results to illustrate the improvements in usability and customer satisfaction. When you implement the design, this should lead to a reduction in support calls, which is tracked. Savings from fewer support calls can be calculated to show ROI. It’s likely these changes will lead to greater retention and conversions as well.

• Review your company’s web analytics data for key areas where you want users to proceed to a critical action – perhaps a conversion – but where they are dropping off. You may review the page and think different wording or button colour would improve conversions. If you want relevant feedback on the current page, you could intercept people using the site with a tool like Ethnio, Qualaroo, Survicate, YesInsights or 4Q Survey to schedule them for a quick study, or to have them answer a short survey.  

• Test early iterations of your new design using an online first-click test to see if participants go where you expect when asked to perform tasks. You can even ask what people notice first on a page. Better yet, run one study with an image of your current design, and one with an image of the new design to see how user performance compares. If you have a clear winner, it should be easy to get buy-in to improve conversions, which would be a great return on investment. Great options for these first click tools are Optimal Workshop’s Chalkmark or Usability Hub’s First Click Analysis.

• Work closely with developers to ensure designs and development are done well the first time, preventing re-work. In planning meetings, be alert for extensive development work planned to go work with interfaces that clearly need to be redesigned. Rather than just let them proceed, bring potential design problems and ideas for improvements to the team. Do a quick usability test – even if it’s on paper – testing your ideas against the current design. If it’s on the right track, use the insights from these results to suggest alternative approaches and get stakeholder buy-in to do the project the right way the first time.

The more you work with co-workers such as support, sales and development and show them the value of UX, the more support you will have within the organisation. These in-the-trenches supporters will see the value of your work and the successes with customers first hand, and that will go a long way toward impacting workplace culture and filtering up to senior level support of UX.

Learn from leaders

Stakeholders aren’t just there to be “managed”. They are the keepers of useful information that can help you plan your user research and design work. If you ask for their knowledge, they will feel included and heard. It’s good for everyone.

Here’s the kind of information they can share with you:

• The history of the company’s products. Understanding how the designs came about in the first place and any reactions to them gives you perspective going forward.
• The product requirements. Work with them to understand the requirements and how they apply to the design. Ask questions if any of the requirements seem too prescriptive with regard to the design.
• Information about existing and potential users. Learn about interviews they’ve done with customers and clients, and their understanding of users overall.
• Knowledge of competing products. Product owners often conduct competitive analyses to understand how your company fits into the marketplace and how it needs to improve its position. Learn from their efforts.

When you genuinely consider stakeholders’ input and ideas, you gain perspective about the company and its products, and your co-workers are more likely to be open to your thoughts on user experience and work with you in return.

As you learn your stakeholders’ goals, you can share how good UX can help them meet them. As an added bonus, better understanding your stakeholders and where they’re coming from will improve your ability to cater presentations to their goals, concerns and interests, which is always a plus.

Work together

Whenever you start working on the research and design – or re-design – of a feature or product, you should bring decision-makers into the process. Talk to them to get their knowledge and perspective on the work at hand.

You may want to conduct interviews or focus groups with different stakeholders to hear their perspectives on who the users are, and how and why they think the product or feature will help them. You can even use what you learn to create user profiles. Even though these are based a lot on assumptions, they’re still a good starting point for creating research-based personas. If you do create profiles or personas, be sure to run those by stakeholders too, to make sure you have their buy-in before you create products based on them.

But don’t stop there. While it’s important to engage stakeholders at the beginning, you need to keep them involved throughout the process so they see progress and can keep giving input.

• At the start of a project, hold a kickoff meeting or workshop to decide on design project goals, UX goals, strategies and schedules together. Include exercise where small groups brainstorm design ideas to get them engaged.

• When planning usability testing, invite stakeholders to contribute to the goals about what should be examined and review the moderator guide with them. In addition, invite them to observe your test sessions to help them see first-hand how valuable it is to understand users’ contexts and issues.

• Share your findings in short, clear reports that include bullet points, screenshots and callouts that clearly show results and offer recommendations for improvement. This speeds comprehension and decision making.

• Conduct co-design sessions with the UX team and stakeholders to ensure their concerns are heard while addressing usability concerns. This participation also helps stakeholders see the value of UX first hand.

Including stakeholders throughout the design process, and letting them know you value their opinions, will make them feel comfortable sharing their ideas and feedback. Sometimes seeing the designs at various points could remind them of other feedback or information they have from customers, and gives them a chance to inform the designs.

Your turn

Consider your current and upcoming projects and think about where it would make sense to strengthen your ties with company and product leaders. Brainstorm ideas with your UX teammates about how you could effectively incorporate stakeholders into the design process.

What techniques could work for you based on where you are in the project and the project needs, and what types of changes would be meaningful?

Work hand in hand with your company’s decision makers and thought leaders to create a stronger user experience than you could on your own. Your users will thank you.  

Extra resources

Cost-Justifying Usability
By Randolph Bias and Deborah Mayhew
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers

Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing and Presenting Usability Metrics
By Tom Tullis and Bill Albert
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers

How to Collaborate with Stakeholders on UX Research
By Susan Farrell
Nielsen Norman Group

20 Tips for Selling UX to Clients
By Kimberley Magain
UX Mastery

The ROI of UX Research: How to Win Funding and Secure Buy-In
By Susan Weinschenk
UserZoom Webinar Series
Related Q&A: http://www.userzoom.com/roi-of-ux/the-roi-of-ux-research-questions-and-answers/

Make a Strong Business Case for the ROI of UX (Infographic)
By Frank Spillers
Experiencedynamics

More useful tools for measuring and proving UX
uxmastery.com/resources/tools/

The post Proven Strategies to Win Over Stakeholders for Your UX Project appeared first on UX Mastery.

Usability testing comes in many forms: casual cafeteria studies, formal lab testing, remote online task-based studies and more. However you choose to carry out your testing, you’ll need to go through these five phases:

• Prepare your product or design to test
• Find your participants
• Write a test plan
• Take on the role of moderator
• Present your findings

That’s it. A usability test can be as basic as approaching strangers at Starbucks and asking them to use an app. Or it can be as involved as an online study with participants responding on a mobile phone.

Usability testing is effective because you can watch potential users of your product to see what works well and what needs to be improved. It’s not about getting participants to tell you what needs adjusting. It’s about observing them in action, listening to their needs and concerns, and considering what might make the experience work better for them.  

Early on, usability tests in computer science were conducted primarily in academia or large companies such as Bell Labs, Sun, HP, AT&T, Apple and Microsoft. The practice of usability testing grew in the mid-1980s with the start of the modern usability profession, and books and articles popularised the method. With the explosion of digital products, it’s continued to gain popularity because it’s considered one of the best ways to get input from real users.

A common mistake in usability testing is conducting a study too late in the design process. If you wait until right before your product is released, you won’t have the time or money to fix any issues – and you’ll have wasted a lot of effort developing your product the wrong way. Instead, conduct several small-scale tests throughout the cycle, starting as early as paper sketches.

Create a design or product to test

How do you decide what to test? Start by testing what you’re working on.

• Do you have any questions about how your design will work in practice, such as a particular interaction or workflow? Those are perfect.
  
• Are you wondering what users notice on your home page? Or what they would do first? This is a great time to ask.
  
• Planning to redesign a website or app? Test the current version to understand what’s not working so you can improve upon any issues.

Once you know what you’d like to test, come up with a set of goals for your study. Be as specific as possible, because you’ll use the goals to come up with the particular study tasks. A goal can be broad, such “ Can people navigate through the website to find the products they need?” Or they can be specific, such as “Do people notice the link to learn more about a particular product on this page?”

You also need to figure out how to represent your designs for the study. If you’re studying a current app or website, you can simply use that. For early design ideas, you can use a paper “prototype” made from pencil sketches or designed through software such as PowerPoint.

If you’re farther along in your ideas and want something more representative of the interactions, you can create an interactive prototype using a tool such as Balsamiq or Axure. Whatever you create, make sure it will allow participants to perform the tasks you want to test.

Find your participants

When thinking about participants, consider who will be using your product and how you can reach those people.  

If you have an app that targets hikers, for example, you could post your request on a Facebook page for hikers. If your website targets high school English teachers, you could send out a request for participants in educational newsletters or websites. If you have more money, hire a recruiting firm to find people for you (don’t forget to provide screener questions to find the right people). If you have no money,  reach out to friends and family members and ask if they know anyone who meets your criteria.

Be prepared. Participant recruiting is often one of the lengthier parts of any usability study, and should be one of the first things you put into action. This way as you’re working on other parts – like writing your tasks and questions – the recruitment process will be progressing concurrently.

You might also wonder how many participants you will need. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen says testing five people will catch 85% of the usability issues with a design – and that you can catch the remaining 15% of issues with 15 users. Ideally then, you should test with five users, make improvements, test with five more, make improvements, and test with five more. (As a general rule, recruit at least one more participant than you need, because typically one person will not show up.)

No matter who you’re testing, you’ll want to offer some sort of incentive, such as cash or a gift card, for participants’ time. The going rate is different in different parts of the world. Generally, you should charge more if the test in-person (because participants have to travel to get there), and less if it’s remote, through a service such as WebEx. Audiences that are hard to reach – such as doctors or other busy and highly trained professionals – will require more compensation.

Write a test plan

To keep yourself organised, you need a test plan, even if it’s a casual study. The plan will make it easy to communicate with stakeholders and design team members who may want input into the usability test and, of course, keep yourself on track during the actual study days. This is a place for you to list out all the details of the study. Here are potential study plan sections:

• Study goals: The goals should be agreed upon with any stakeholders, and they are important for creating tasks.
• Session information: This is a list of session times and participants. You can also include any information about how stakeholders and designers can log into sessions to observe. For example, you can share – and record – sessions using WebEx or gotomeeting.
• Background information and non-disclosure information: Write a script to explain the purpose of the study to participants; tell them you’re testing the software, not them; let them know if you’ll be recording the sessions; and make sure they understand not to share what they see during the study (having participants sign a non-disclosure agreement as well is a best practice). Ask them to please think aloud throughout the study so you can understand their thoughts.
• Tasks and questions: Start by asking participants a couple of background questions to warm them up. Then ask them to perform tasks that you want to test. For example, to learn how well a person was able to navigate to a type of product, you could have them start on the home page and say, “You are here to buy a fire alarm. Where would you go to do that?” Also consider any follow-up questions you might want to ask, such as “How easy or difficult was that task?” and provide a rating scale.
• Conclusion: At the end of the study, you can ask any observers if there are questions for the participant, and ask if the participant has anything to else they’d like to say.

It might help to start your test plan with a template.

Take on the role of moderator

It’s your job as moderator – the one leading usability sessions – to make sure the sessions go well and the team gets the information they need to improve their designs. You need to make participants feel comfortable while making sure they proceed through the tasks, and while minimising or managing any technical difficulties and observer issues. And stay neutral. You can do this!

The test plan is your guide. Conducting a pilot study – or test run – the day before the actual sessions start also helps your performance as a moderator because you get to practice working through all the aspects of the test.

Observe and listen

As you go through the study with participants, remember that it’s your job to be quiet and listen; let the participants do the talking. That’s how you and your team will learn. Be prepared to ask “why?” or say “Tell me more about that” to get participants to elaborate on their thoughts. Keep your questions and body language neutral, and avoid leading participants to respond a certain way.

During the sessions, someone will need to take notes. Ideally, you’ll have a separate note-taker so you can focus on leading sessions. If not, you’ll need to do this while moderating. Either way, set up a note-taking sheet in a spreadsheet tool (I use Excel) to simplify the process both now and when analysing the data. One organised way to do this is to have each column represent a participant, and each row a question or task. Learn more about writing effective research observations.

In addition to taking notes, plan to record the sessions using a tool such as WebEx or Camtasia as a backup, just in case you miss something. You’ll find a useful list of tools here.

Make sure you prepare for things to go wrong (and something always does). Consider the following:

• Some participants will be a few minutes late. If they are, but you still want to use them, what are the lowest priority tasks or questions that you will cut out?
• The prototype software could stop working or have a bug. Try to have a backup – such as paper screenshots – if you think this is a possibility.
• In a remote study, some participants will have difficulty using the video conferencing tool. Know in advance how the screen looks to them, what they should do, and common things that can go wrong so you can guide them through the experience.

Remote testing

If you’re conducting a remote unmoderated study, a remote tool – such as UserZoom or Loop11 – takes the place of the moderator. Because of the extra distance, you need to write your introduction to set the tone and provide background information about the study; effectively present the tasks; and keep users on track. It’s important to do as much as possible to test remote studies before launching them to prevent technical difficulties as well.

Present your findings

As you’re going through your sessions, it’s a good idea to jot down themes you notice, especially if they’re related to the study’s goals. Consider talking with observers after each session or at the end of each day to get a sense of their main learnings. Once the sessions are over, comb through your notes to look for more answers to the study’s stated goals, and count how many participants acted certain ways and made certain types of comments.  Determine the best way to communicate this information to help stakeholders.

Consider these methods of documenting your findings:

• If your audience is an agile team that needs to start acting on the information right away, an email with a bulleted list of findings may be all you need. If you can pair the email with a quick chat with team members, the team will process the information better.
• A PowerPoint presentation can be a great way to document your findings, including screenshots with callouts, and graphs to help make your points stand out. You can even include links to video clips that illustrate your points well.
• If you’re in a more academic environment, or your peers will read a report, write up a formal report document. Don’t forget to include images to illustrate your findings.

Where to next?

These resources can serve as excellent references on usability testing:

• Don’t Make Me Think and Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug
• Observing the User Experience by Mike Kuniavsky
• Handbook of Usability Testing by Jeffrey Rubin and Dana Chisnell

Once you master the basics of usability testing, you can expand into other types of testing such as:

• Remote moderated testing (same as lab testing, only your participants are somewhere else, and you communicate through WebEx or a similar tool and a phone)
• Remote unmoderated testing (usability testing with hundreds of people through a tool such as UserZoom or Loop11)
• A/B testing (testing two designs against each other to see which performs better)
• competitive testing (pitting your design against your competitors’ designs)
• benchmark studies (testing your site or app’s progress over time)

Usability testing is a critical part of the user-centered design process because it allows you to see what’s working and what’s not with your designs. Challenge yourself to get more out of your sessions by using at least one new idea from this article during your next – or first – round of testing.

The post How to Conduct Usability Testing from Start to Finish appeared first on UX Mastery.

If this sounds intimidating, it shouldn’t. The technique is straightforward; you just need to break it down into steps.

The first step is to decide whether this type of testing would be useful for you. Competitive testing can help you:

• See where your product falls short – and where it does well – so you can focus attention where it is most needed.
• Understand what your competition does well that you can incorporate or address in your product.
• Better understand why people choose your product, and why they choose your competitors’ products so you know whom you’re serving and how you can best help them (or find out your users are not who you thought they were).
• Make a case to stakeholders about work that must be done to make your product competitive – or, conversely, to show how well you perform in comparison to competitors.

The reason my fellow researcher and I decided to conduct a competitive study at iContact several years ago was to prove to our leadership that the message-creation tool was not competitive and needed an overhaul.

It worked. The tool, which had not been on the product roadmap, was made the top priority once stakeholders saw how poorly the current version of it fared against two competitors: Constant Contact and MailChimp.  

Building the case for our study

Our UX team had heard from the customer support team and read in online reviews that users had a lot of difficulty with several aspects of the message creation tool.

For example:

• It was difficult to upload and work with images.
• Customers often lost their work in the middle of creating messages.
• Finished messages that looked good to users looked completely different (read: bad) when they reached customers’ inboxes.;

These issues sounded critical, so we sought to better understand what was going on.

First, I conducted a competitive analysis, writing up how important features compared in iContact and its competitors. Second, I conducted an online survey to get quantitative data about the issues affecting customers and what they most wanted to see fixed. Finally, we conducted the competitive study.

Designing a study

If you think competitive testing could be useful to you, ask yourself a few questions:

• Which competitor products should I include? Is it possible to get access to them?
• What criteria do I want participants to have? If it makes sense for your study, it can work well to find participants who are not familiar with any of the products so they have no existing knowledge or biases. 
• What tasks should participants perform? It’s easiest to compare performance if participants perform the same tasks on all the products. Be sure to switch the order in which participants use the products to avoid bias effect. 
• What metrics should I capture during testing? The time spent on each task, whether participants were actually able to complete the tasks, and ease of use ratings are all good measures to track.

Conducting the study

When planning for the competitive study, we wanted participants who had experience sending email newsletters to audiences for their companies or volunteer organisations. Since we were recruiting through friends and family and Craigslist, we couldn’t be as specific as we liked about what tools they had used, but made sure they represented using a mix of our product, our competitors’ products, and email applications such as Outlook. We recruited 16 participants and gave them each a $100 gift card.

We selected five important tasks for an email marketing tool – including finding a template, editing an image and importing text from MS Word – and had each participant perform them in all three tools. (We did have to sign up for fake accounts in the two external tools)

The test took two hours per participant. We recorded the time it took each person to complete – or give up on – each task; which tasks they completed successfully; and their responses to a few rating questions – such as their satisfaction level with their completed messages and the ease of creating messages in each tool. One interesting finding was that our customers tended to choose us because we were least expensive, not because we were good.

Getting an actionable result

We analysed all the findings and wrote a report with the results of this study.  As we had suspected, it showed that iContact’s tool fared poorly. The presentation to the leadership team really drove home the fact that change was imperative.

We started by giving the leaders in attendance seven minutes to work on a specific message in iContact’s tool, to familiarise them with the (frustrating) experience.  After this exercise, they were engaged in the results and felt the users’ pain when we showed videos of participants suffering through losing messages after working so hard to create them.

Soon after our presentation, the leaders gave the go-ahead for a long-term effort to redesign the tool. This resulted in a much-improved interface that upon release immediately reduced customer service calls and increased conversions to iContact.

Your turn

As you’re coming up with ideas for researching your product, keep competitive testing in mind. It’s definitely doable and can give you great information about where you stand and how you should proceed with your designs.

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