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What is User Testing

Alright. It is time to talk about user testing. What it is. Some of the terms how you find people to do your tests. So it's going to be this video. The first thing we need to cover is the two main ways of testing. Okay? There is a moderated test and an unmodified rated test. Okay, So moderated test sometimes called a hallway test over the shoulder test is basically in person. Okay, So that means that I'm the moderator, I find my user okay, my user that I need to do for the testing, we sit next to each other and I pull up my laptop and I preview my XT on the screen and we work through the test and we'll talk about what to do in the test later on. But that's called a moderated test. I'm the moderator there there. Okay. And unmotivated test is when I'm not around. Okay. That's basically where I just send the link that I generated in XD. Remember we went to publish and I'm pointing up there like it's in the top, right? But you know, we go up there top and publish and you get the link that ...

people can you can send off to get tested. So that is a moderated tested. There's nobody around you ask them to do some stuff and they send it back to you. Um Yeah, so those are the two terms, let's talk about them a little bit more specifically about how to find the people for those tests. Alright. First up, let's talk about how to find people for your moderated test because that's the hardest one, right? And you need to find people close enough to you to do the tests. Don't want to be flying around or anything silly like that. So how do you find those people first of all? You need to identify your person that you're looking for? Remember our persona? Remember we've looked at Peter through instructor HQ. Catherine was in. Was that my new furniture and you're gonna meet jake later on. But let's say it's Katherine, you need to find Katherine's okay and probably the best place is to go and ask your client. Okay? And just say do you know the people? Because often that's where I find the best people is the people I'm doing work for. Well no, they'll have some super users or some potential clients or no the industry well and have friends that will help out. They'll be they'll fit the right persona. So that's one way. The other way that I've found useful is especially for local stuff is things like user groups and meetups. So user group. Like I used the adobe user group in Dublin for my last project and I just emailed the that kind of moderate either Edmund for it and said, hey, it's all right if I send a message to your group um Or would you mind sending a no doubt to say I'm looking for these types of people. Um You know, you tell them what you want from them um a day that you might meet with them and what you're gonna pay them potentially or what sort of transaction you want to do. And that's an easy way. Meet up. Dot com is another great place to find groups. So if you've never used it and check it out, it's just, you know, if you look at meet up, you'll find a zillion different groups in your area and hopefully you can find your persona in one of those groups and do the same thing, email whoever the Edmon is and ask if you can do tests with them. So those are the main places that I find kind of moderated people. And let's now talk about in a sec. The un moderated. So um moderated people, they are easier to find because you can pay people to go find them for you. So you can use the same methods. Ask the client find user groups and obviously the user groups say on facebook have groups. Okay. And that can be obviously around the world. So it's a lot easier to find people yourself if you're lazy like me and you have the budget, you can just go to a company and pay them to give you users. So I use a company called user testing dot com. It's not the only one out there. It's just the one I happen to start with. And so yeah, I go to them and say dear user testing dot com, I would like to test for Uh you know men that are in their thirties that have this kind of socio economic backgrounds and I want them to do a test and you pay them, you can they start off at about $50 a pop. So say you need five of them, okay, you're gonna get 250 bucks to get it tested. Um So yeah, that's you can just pay somebody that might be within your budget. It might not. But yeah, the cool thing about that is it's fast like user testing, give them the user giving them the details in the morning and before the end of the afternoon you'll have your reports back and they'll send you videos of them using your technique or using your prototype and giving you verbal feedback and written if you asked for it. So that's an easy way to go out and find a new moderated testers. Now, what do you pay them? This will this is really subjective. Okay. It depends what country you live in, what the value of the dollar is, that type of thing. So let's let's pretend we're in the US, the euro. It's about the same. So it's $50 worth of value is probably, it seems to be my magic number for getting the right people there. You can pay less and you will still find people, but you might get lonely people or weird people have found like trying to go cheap and you just end up with people that aren't like the value is not enough. The right kinds of people end up with people that just want company, they come and hang out. It's not what you want. So you don't have to pay them, pay them. You might find that your group, you use a group, you just might find willing participants and you don't have to, I find for like commercial stuff. I do need to swap something. Um I really try and find something that doesn't have a cost to the business. So Say it might be a subscription so it's not going to cost them anything or something that the company already has in stock or can supply um to them as a like a trade. Okay, so that's uh that's but that kind of $50 value seems to be great and But you're not gonna get consultants, you know like doctors probably doing it $50. You're probably gonna have to do it as a different kind of angle. And I haven't had to do it with doctors. You might have to let me know if you make that happen. But yeah, you need some sort of value to change to exchange to make this thing happen and but that's just my ideas and opinions. So that's kind of pricing. So how many people do you need for your test turns out it's just five. Okay so smarter UX researchers than me have worked out that basically if you send a product out to be tested, the everything that needs to be found will be found within the first five people. Anything after that you could test for another 100 people, but they'll just come back with the same same kind of issues that the first five have. So you can just keep it quite small and so do the test, get the feedback, Make adjustments, go back to another fives, you might end up having to budget for 15. Okay, so you can go back three times to do testing. You might have to go back 100 times. It depends on your product, but you don't need that many people. I find quite a lot of value in just the three and that's mainly because I'm cheap and I'm a freelancer and I'm dealing with like lower budget. So often I go out to just three of them. But apparently the magic number is five. And it's been in my experience as well that that's you don't need any more than that before you start making kind of adjustments and changes. So that is just five. Now, how do you run a good test? Now, this will differ from the different UX designers about what they find most valuable and it will depend on your product and what you're doing so. And my best kind of UX tests and my my method has been like when I first started, I'd give a lot of direction. Okay so I'd say let's talk about moderated tests, I've got a person here hugging them okay. Um But I will tell I used to tell them things like I want you to go to the menu picker and I want you to go to the course and then I want you to buy it using your credit card and they do that and I'd be like whoa my design rules, you know like perfect problem was is that they were following my instructions, I told them where to go, I told them what navigation and what the terms were. Um So you want to be very you want to give them the end goal but none of the process. So something a better question might be. I want you to purchase a course that's interesting to you okay And let them kind of fumble around because that fumbling around you really want to help them. I do I'm a teacher but it's not going to run a good test if you're helping them. So you're going to explain at the beginning, it's gonna be explained. It's a bit weird to say to get the most value from this test with me. I need to be you need to pretend I'm not here. You know, let's ask follow up questions. I'm going to give you a task, give it to them one at a time, don't give them a bunch of things to do little freak amount okay give them one task to do, I write mine down. I find it's easier. Okay. And then, because otherwise I end up giving away too much speaking and they can ask questions I just say and then they go off and do it. Okay? So when they go off and do it, what you're doing as part of the test, as the moderator is your should be recording the screen that they're doing it on okay if you can set up a mic even better. I just use like an iphone that has the voice note thing, just record it that way if your computer won't do it and record that. But what, where the real value comes from and why a moderated test is better than an unmodified rated test is the kind of like the nonverbal cues, right? All those tics and twitches and hesitations and sweat, okay. That comes from the user when their last or they're unsure. They're using their mouth, mouth to kind of like think on the screen is useful but it's all that stuff that comes from their their nervous tics and their moans in their uh you know those kind of nonverbal cues and that's the notes that you're taking and it's like, it's one of those kind of like human intuition things when you're writing stuff down based on what you feel is going on there. It's really hard to kind of measure other than a feeling, but you've got to verbalize this for your test results. So you're writing down where they got lost, where you think you can improve and yeah, I kind of like document their journey. So live testing, I find better with written, I find I explain it at the beginning that I need to, you know, I can't answer questions and you have like a safety word, okay, it doesn't have to be a safety word, but if they get totally lost and like I'm out um you know, I don't I don't know what to do anymore, They're allowed to say that okay. And um but just tell them until they get to that point, they can just keep going with that task and you'll give you them another task afterwards, don't as well. For your first year you're gonna be like, I'm gonna get them to do 50 things, you will get them to do about five, it takes forever. And there's gonna be some people who are only going to get you to, that's why you keep the things separate. So you put just have them in your pocket, have them in a briefcase, have them somewhere else so that the person doing the test doesn't know that they've got like 10 more to go. And because there's a time limit, right? You say I'm gonna do it for an hour with you, half an hour and they're like, oh man, I've only done the first question and already halfway through it. You don't want to stress them out that way. You want to keep your testers Happy and as natural as possible. So just give them, you know, if they only get through two questions fine, if they get through 20, that's fine too. But yeah so writing down documented, record the screen. That is that makes a good moderated test. So how do you run an unmodified rated test? So if you're going to use a company like user testing dot com or use analytics, they will do it all for you. Okay. And the feedback is amazing. But say you want to, you do yourself, you're gonna send a link off now. The real caveman one is just getting comments back and that's, it'll be a minimum. That's fine. Getting comments through the XD app or through the web interface is fine. But what you're really looking for is something kind of more live and that's done through recording the screen on their side. So it'll depend on the user, right? Some people will be able to do this. No problem. Like if you sent me a test, I could record my screen, I've got camped Asia and all sorts of good goodies to record screens and some people just asked if I if you had to ask my mom if she could do a user test and she had to do it um moderated and recorded herself wouldn't happen. Okay. She needed, you know, I need to be with her by her side to help her through that. But let's say there are reasonably technical okay if they're on a Mac, there's an easy way to record your voice and the screen at the same time with no extra software. It's a program called Quick Time. It's built into all mac computers. They open up quicktime, you might give them a quick little demo through Skype or something, but basically they gotta file, record screen and it just records the audio and video and when it's finished they had stopped and asked them to save it somewhere and then they can send it to you via um dropbox or google drive or amazon, I forget what they're called. But some way of sharing files and that's a great way to get it back and just make sure that they know the rules as in give them tasks, asked them to go through these steps one by one. So the written steps don't go onto the next one until they finished the first one and also asked them to verbalize what they're thinking, Okay, as they go through it all. And so that's on a pc. Remember the Xbox tricked we looked at earlier on, I think a Windows 10. Have you can find the Xbox app, search for it in the applications, there is an option for recording your screen. It's meant to be for gaming, but you can use it for what we need today as well. Another one is screen flow. I'm pretty sure that's free and it's on a pc. So that would be a good way of gathering information and getting it back. Otherwise you can go out to a company and use the testing company and they will handle it all for you. So that is how to run an on moderated test. Next step is to report back and this will depend on a couple of things we're working maybe in house at a larger company and you've got to report back to senior management. They'll expect lovely things like PowerPoint slides and I find it's useful to kind of snip out some of the video. Okay. And audio. So so you've got some mp four of them doing the user test, take out little snips that help back up some of the points you're making. So say the bullet point is um you know, people are taking five steps when they should be taking three because they're getting lost this direction, you might show a little example of that in there. Some companies are gonna want like quite a big bit of feedback for my $4,000, they get a mini version. What I try and do is report back live. I find it so much better in person. I'll take notes. Okay, I'll have like a pdf with the basic kind of notes and then I'll show them some examples, I'll brand and make it look pretty, but we're not going to go through too much often though the process works a little bit differently. So they'll they'll pass the job to me just to do, they don't want the test back. They just wanted to be the best it can be and that's easier. So what you do end up doing is I'll do three tests or five depending on the budget. And basically I'll double back to XD once I've identified any issues and note them down what they were. But make the changes and go straight back out to use the testing without going to the client. Okay. So I'll just go my own little loop okay of getting it right until I feel like it's there's nothing else to be worked out okay. And then I'll go to the client with the finished product and I say this has been tested okay. And explain what I did and what changes happened and where earlier problems went. But I kind of do it on the fly. Okay. So it's just, it's quick and easy, especially for unM moderated tests. Even for moderated tests, like when I sat down with the adobe user group, basically I did it as I was going, it was gonna be such a hassle and who knows when this group was going to meet again. So I basically had them for an hour or two and the first people kind of had some initial really like clear issues that I agree with and I just did them on the fly, change it in the next person went through and then that kind of like, that issue wasn't a problem. So I was doing it as I wasn't waiting for five and then coming back the official way because it was just gonna be too hard and not just yeah, it was just gonna be easier just to do it on the fly and get our product up to a certain point um within that one meeting. But officially, if you're doing it in a larger company in a proper like flow, you know, you're in part of a kind of a scrum group or some sort of agile company or framework, there's going to be a bit more specific or maybe predetermined metrics about what you need to feed back to management. Just figure out what those are. That's it for user testing. A lot of talking about user testing, how about we'll go through an actual one of my projects in the next video and show you how to connect it with XD and show you what kind of feedback you get and just do it. Yeah, seeing that video