Enjoy listening to the participants painstakingly try to explain your product as many times as you want! Hearing users explain their thinking will help you experience your product from their perspective.
Be sure to pay attention to the exact words they use — these details are crucial. For example, if your participants kept referring to your main screen as a ‘Dashboard’ but you’ve got buttons for ‘Home’ all over the app, you’ve got a mismatch between your app and their expectations.
Rewatching also encourages you to notice small details you might have missed during the test.
Plus, it’s an opportunity to collect lots of evidence to back up your claims when talking to other people on your team. If someone has been doubting this process, show them some select moments and watch their expression change right before your eyes.
It’s important to remember your participants will likely never present you with the solution to a problem they struggled with — instead they provide insights into their experience. It’s your job to take these insights and turn them into specific solutions in the form of new features, products, prototypes, ideas to test further, and more.
For example, if you see your participants struggling with a date picker on your app, ask yourself questions like:
These questions will help you distil your learnings into a specific solution. And when we say specific, we don’t mean “Fix the date picker.” Instead, frame the solution around the participant’s problem. Something like, “Add copy to the date picker screen to help users understand why they need to select a date.”
We’ve found the results of these tests reveal themselves… and can’t be unseen. Generally after one test you’ll spot something — and after five it’s confirmed.
The ones which are confirmed by multiple participants are the results you want to focus on. There will always be a million things to fix in your app, but the ones that stand out in tests like these are usually the most critical things blocking users from being successful.
There are many ways you could prioritize what you work on most urgently, but we typically look at three metrics:
There will be many many small things you notice. Save them for later in some kind of backlog (Trello is a great — and free — tool for something like this) and refer back to them when you begin working on future improvements.
Congrats! You’ve tested five users, and you’ve learned some incredible lessons about how people use your app and what they need to be successful.
Now it’s time to take everything you’ve learned, implement your solutions, improve your product, and… test again!
Wait, what?
Yep, you read that correctly. User testing is never a one-and-done event — at least not if your ultimate goal is to build something people can’t (or don’t want to) live without.
As you conduct more and more tests, you’ll apply your learnings to make changes — sometimes subtle and sometimes massive — to your product to better achieve product-market fit.
With each iteration, you’ll get you closer to the product of your users’ dreams — until one day you just might develop the Windows 95 of this generation.
