let's talk about user testing if you are in a large company you might work with ux researchers
to conduct usability testing sessions but there will always be cases where you as a
designer has to do the entire usability study session by yourself that's why I'm going to take
you through how to plan and conduct a usability testing session I'll also share with you a Miro
template at the end of this video so make sure you keep watching why should you do user testing
user testing is the most direct way to understand whether whatever you design makes sense for the
audience for every one dollar invested in user experience research you save 10 in development
and a hundred dollar in post-release maintenance so do more user testing help your company save
more money and when should you do user testing the earlier the better anytime whenever you feel like
you're not sure about whether your design is making sense let's say your company helped you
to gather around five participants for a quick user testing session this is what you shall do
I personally like to plan within a Miro board Miro is a tool that all of my user researchers friends
use and if you can use figma this will be super intuitive as well Miro is also the sponsor of this
video so thank you very much the first thing you shall do is to dump all the background information
what is the project or the product you are working on explain its current phases what are
the stakeholders for this project who is planning this research who's doing this research who's
driving this project and who will be impacted from this research if there's other background
or links that can be included you can also dump it in the third section if there's a clear timeline
you can also put it here now let's go to the planning section where the most magic happens
and before you go into the planning session you shall have one or two figma prototype ready and
you probably have an idea of what you want to test usually it is I want to test this latest
iteration of my design so that I can iterate upon this design and the provider finalized version now
for research questions and hypothesis you want to test you can actually plan the session out with
other designers or other product stakeholders so what I often do is that I hold a zoom call I
invite other people in I send them this Miro link and then everyone just type together on the notes
and then we highlight whichever hypothesis that we think it's the key for testing out
this hypothesis are usually parts of design that you are unsure about
the next thing you shall do is to came up with a few kpis or metrics these are things that you
can count that will also reflect how good is your product then there's a small section for you to
write out the methodology methodology include do you want to do this in person do you want to do
it over Zoom call if you're doing Zoom versus Google meet make sure you understand how to
record things in different products make sure you set the user testing time to the right time zone
and here you also need to plan out who you are going to recruit as participants for this user
testing session and how many you are going to recruit this decision will be made based on who
will be the key target audience for your product who are able to reach the resource you are going
to have and also the time allowance then you can write out a basic scripts for scripts I often do
four parts the first part is intro ask them about their basic information and then tell them what
this session is about tell them there's no right or wrong answer in this session and then we're
just looking for an honest feedback then we can go to the user testing part where as a designer
we will share a figma prototype link when you share someone a figma prototype link there's
no need for them to share the screen because you can simply click on their icon on the Prototype
page and then whenever you click on that icon you can Shadow their actions during this user testing
stage you'll be asking them to complete the few actions you wanted to test out and once they
complete each action you can ask them a follow-up question regarding how do you like about it what
can be better and finally ask a few follow-up questions regarding how do they feel about the
overall design do they find it easy to understand difficult to understand what can be improved upon
for the next section you can just paste in your fake prototype links to here now after
you recruited these participants note that down into this field you can put in the participant
name and then the session time and during the session all you need to do is follow the script
you don't have to exactly follow the script but the overall structure needs to be following the
script and you need to be aware of the time it would be great if you can set up the session in
a way so someone can quietly take notes for you or record the session yourself and take note later on
so here are some tips for note-taking for the background section you can color that in yellow
you can start all the general notes with orange General stickers once the session is over or
during the session when you have time you can group things into different categories I mostly
use these categories blue stands for emotions when are they showing happiness when are they showing
confusions when are they showing surprises note those done green stands for likes what do they
say about what they like and then pink stands for dislikes here's a tip for note-taking don't try
to paraphrase just note down what exactly are these users saying because whenever you try to
paraphrase it kind of changes the feeling so keep the grammar mistakes the user were making don't
try to clean things up for them now after each session review all these notes and then pick out
the insights that you'll find very valuable for the next step you can first put it in the general
notes section on the right side of each box the next step is to synthesize everyone's answer and
then bring them into a realization or some sticker notes you can bring the most important insights
here and then summarize them into different categories once this is done highlighted the
areas you want to focus on for the next iteration remember you don't have to use every single thing
the user said and you don't have to make a hundred percent of the users 100 happy usually
I try to figure out what are some small design changes that I can make to make big impact for
the users if you like this Miro template go click the link in the description and thank you Miro for
sponsoring today's video Miro is a leading visual collaboration platform that empowers collaboration
across different teams across different time zones it's super intuitive to use and it is very popular
in the tech industry so many of my ux researchers co-workers are using Miro and it's also free let
me know if you find this video helpful good luck with your next user testing session I'm
Aliena I talk about design I talk about tech if you like my video subscribe to my channel
and turn on all notifications and follow me on Instagram thank you so much see you next time