Define what you’re testing and why

Tempting as it might be to test #allthethings, it’s just not possible — at least not in a single day. Instead, focus on what’s most important to your users. You probably already have a hunch about a feature or task that’s not working in your app, either from intuition, customer feedback, or data, so start there.

If you don’t know what to focus on, get a new user to sign up for your app and give them the task of using your core functionality. For example, if you were facilitating testing for Airbnb, you would ask your participant to create an account and complete a booking. The more it hurts to watch the more valuable it is. Don’t look away!

Decide what you want to understand

Now that you’ve decided which feature or task to test you likely have a hypothesis on why it’s not working as expected.

List out all the reasons why you believe users are having trouble. Using the Airbnb example again, it would look something like this:

• We want to understand if users know what Airbnb is based on the home page.
• We want to understand if users are able to create an account successfully.
• We want to understand if users can use the date picker correctly.

These questions will become the foundation of your test outline and script. (Don’t worry, we’ve provided templates for both here.)

Build out the foundations of your test

To conduct your user test, you’re going to need the following materials. Make sure to save our templates to your Google Drive to save you time down the line.

• User test outline and script
• Outreach email

These materials will become the foundation of your test, guiding everything from the people you recruit to the questions you ask.