Wrapping up another long, hard, but also highly stimulating day at the user testing lab and reflecting on a colleague's performance.
The scene is the standard one: A suburban low-rise just off the interstate with a suite of testing rooms each skirted with an anteroom behind a 2-way mirror where subjects can be scrutinized anonymously by the UX team and assorted other stakeholders who might care to pop in.
I’m not facilitating today – my job is too scribble notes furiously and wish I'd developed a short-hand system for myself. “I can always replay the recording when we do ‘interp,’” I remind myself. The facility is third party and they’re Johnny-on-the-spot with the coffee and snacks and lunch orders and dutifully run a video recording of the session on DVD into the observer area 5 minutes after each subject leaves.
My partner, who’ll we’ll call Jennifer, is the one with the Masters in HCI from DePaul. She’s facilitating and I’ve been watching her regroup today after the dressing-down she took from our supervisor halfway through day one of testing:
- “You’re interviewing. You should be testing.”
- “You’re leading.”
- “You’re using suggestive language – stay neutral.”
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
It was tough to watch because Jennifer’s about the nicest person you’d ever want to meet. Worse, our boss had a definite case. Jennifer was guilty on all counts and everybody knew it.
It’s hard to step back from a person and treat them as coldly as you would a lab rat after a friendly introduction and a round of personable banter.
But that’s exactly what you must do. Think Rick Deckard from ‘Blade Runner.’
Because you’re not going to be there to hold the user’s hand when your design goes to production and your user is sitting alone in their den trying to work through your interface.
“But how?” you might ask. “How do I get clinical? How do I make sure I don’t crumb my usability test by succumbing to my impulse to nudge the user in the right direction, even if only subconsciously.” It's not hard for some, but for others like Jennifer, it's a matter of defeating their basic temperament. Usability testing, though conducted at various levels of expertise, is a true science practiced by people who devote their entire career to it.
I've discovered that if you can adhere to just three simple utterances during this kind of testing, you've gone a long way toward conducting your test the way these experts do:
- “Okay.”
- “What would you do next?”
- “What would you expect to happen here?”
If you’re testing users in such a way as requires you to be in the room, and you’ve invited them to think out loud as they move through your UX, they’re going to ask you questions about what to do next, even if you’ve admonished them against it. It’s human nature. It’d be weird if they didn’t.
But if you can make sure your mouth only forms the above three sentences while the test is in progress, you’re testing like the pros and it’s as if your user WAS actually home alone in their den.
- The first sentence is basic human acknowledgement designed to keep the user from being weirded out if you didn't respond in some capacity when they've said something. That would create a distraction that would foul the test.
- The second is what you say when they get confused and say something like, "I don't get this." or "This doesn't make sense." They haven't asked you a direct question, but the implication is that they'd like a little guidance.
- The third is what you say when they've asked you a direct question about the interface, like "Is this what's supposed to happen?" or "Do I click here now?" or simply, "What do I do now?"
Jennifer did better in the second round of testing, but still wavered numerous times. I would have challenged myself to see how far I could have gotten without saying ANYTHING besides these three things.
Knowing what to say during your usability tests is crucial to its success.
And will keep you from getting shot by a replicant ...
