- Time is a valuable commodity
and in short supply for most product teams.
It would be great if you could test every feature,
journey, or piece of content many times,
but that's often not possible
due to time, budget, and resources.
Inevitably, some journey's, tasks,
screens or functionality are not gonna be tested
as many times as you would like.
If you're in a situation where you have limited time
to run usability testing,
how do you decide which aspects of the design
get more rounds of testing than others.
When we have a long list of products,
features, tasks or journeys to test,
the first thing we should really be doing
is consider the potential to make changes to our design
after we carry out our usability testing.
There's no point choosing something to be tested
in our upcoming sprint,
if we know the usability issues we uncover
are going to sit in a backlog for six months or 12 months.
It's probably better we focus on another area
of the design where we can have the greatest impact
for our users and also for the business.
Then we should consider factors like
what's the risk if we don't test
this particular aspect of the design?
What's the worst that can happen?
Features that we've done before
and have existing components for in our design system,
will inherently be less risky
than completely new features
where we've not performed any design or research.
Other aspects we should consider
is the impact of a specific feature, product,
task or journey on the user and the business.
Some things will be used or valued more highly by users,
and some will be more profitable for the business.
Let's look at a simplified example.
Let's imagine we have three different aspects
of a design we need to test,
and we're not sure if we'll be able to test them all.
Let's also imagine it's impossible
to test them in one study.
So we need to decide what's the priority.
Now the way that you do this is up to you,
and of course could be done in many different ways,
but you could use something like a prioritization matrix.
Here we have three columns for risk,
business impact and user impact.
Down the side we have three things
that need to be tested.
The sign-up process, login and authentication edge cases,
and changing subscription preferences.
Now let's imagine we're gonna give each of these a score.
So one is high, two is medium and three is low.
Starting with the sign-up process,
the risk here is very low.
We have an existing sign-up process
for our other products.
We've done user research on this before.
So in this case,
I'm gonna give this a three for risk.
Business impact, this is going to be a one.
If people can't sign up for our product,
that's lost sales.
For user impact I'm gonna give that a two.
It's a problem for users,
but they'll either move on to a competitor
or contact us if they want the product.
Okay, let's do login and authentication edge cases.
Let's imagine we have these in built security features,
and these are our existing users who need to login.
Now we've not done research on this before.
This is a new feature, so we're going to say high for risk.
Business impact is also going to be high,
because if people can't login
that's going to push a lot of calls
to the customer contact center,
and we could lose some customers as a result.
User impact is also high,
because this is really a problem
if people are having difficulty getting into their account.
That's going to impact their experience
using our service a lot.
Okay, finally let's consider
changing subscription preferences.
Risk is low, we've done this before.
There are plenty of design patterns available,
so we'll give this a three.
Business impact, that's also low.
The business doesn't care if it's a little bit difficult
for people to pause or check their subscriptions.
For the user it's slightly higher impact.
It's going to be annoying if they can't figure out
how to do this themselves,
but it's not a show stopper
because they could email or call the contact center.
So now we have these scores.
We can add them up,
and looking at the lowest total here
we see we have a natural priority for these.
The thing we should really focus on testing
for our next round of usability testing is two,
login and authentication edge cases.
Now calculating priority can be done
in anyway that you choose.
They key important thing here
is that we should focus our efforts
on ensuring we have the greatest impact for users
and for the business in making prioritization decisions
for usability testing.