How to choose the right people to make your integrated usability testing a success, even on a budget
Published Apr 3, 2023, 10:14 AM
Written by Rachel Kelly
Our usability testing process is fast, highly effective and budget-friendly. We carefully select the right people and they give us all kinds of useful information that’d be missed with a large-scale approach.
Our approach to UX keeps people at the centre of our development process
If you want your website or app to be useful to humans, you have to get the right people involved in testing and developing it.
Some companies use large-scale recruitment of people to test software from home – answering set questions or going through scenarios. While this can uncover bugs or sticking-points, we’ve developed a more boutique, truly human-centred approach that gives far superior results, often in a quicker timeframe and at a lower cost.
We design great usability testing sessions to create the right conditions for people to tell us all kinds of things we wouldn't find out any other way.
Scenario-based questions position the participants as the experts whose knowledge we value
After taking some time to understand project goals we develop discussion guides and scenarios with open-ended questions that allow users to complete certain tasks and share what they’re experiencing. We encourage users to talk openly about their thought processes and any challenges or features they enjoy.
It’s an art and a science to construct open-ended questions to test specific scenarios with people. We’re always aiming to gather useful information and themes. Some of our favourite low-cost, immediate-win changes to client websites, apps or on-site info boards/kiosks have come about from our test subjects expanding on the test questions and telling us about what they need, want and appreciate.
Our way of working with usability testing keeps people at the centre of our development process – which meets our aim of building technology with people for people. - Rachel Kelly
Usability testing can enable your organisation to:
- understand how a real person interacts with your product, including their challenges and moments of delight
- swiftly deliver real improvements to your product and their customer experience in the near future
- confidently make strategic decisions based on what your users value and want.
As a bonus: usability testing also exposes people to the work your organisation is doing to listen to it’s users and improve it’s product or service offering, – most research participants are delighted to help and be part of making something successful.
Testing with real people delivers real impact
We do usability testing to find out how real people think, what they want and how they behave.
We deliberately seek out the people who’ll show us how they think and what the do while using the software we create. We want their insights and we also love hearing their great questions.
We take a lean approach, doing things quickly and making the best use of a budget, carefully choosing people who align with the client’s established personas.
The people we select as research participants are typically invited to contribute to various phases of a project, such as Listening Sessions during the Discovery phase or in Usability Testing sessions in the solution phase.
Our warm, personal approach to usability testing builds a deep sense of trust, which often has significant pay-offs, as research participants feel comfortable to share all kinds of information about their experiences.
Usability testing can take place in a variety of different settings
Usability testing can take place in person, online, out in the wild or in a controlled environment, with hand-selected research participants or those chosen using an open approach. We do whatever works best for the research participants and for a client’s timeframes, budget and desired results.
Myths we regularly bust about usability testing
We prove that these commonly-repeated myths don’t hold true if you approach usability testing with a people-first focus.
- You must be in the same room as the participants in order to gain the best insights
- It’s better to do no usability testing than only test with a small group of people
- The design must be perfect before it can be usability tested with people.
At the end of the day, we design digital experiences and software for people. That’s why we involve the right people from the start and throughout the whole process.
