Conduct

How to Start

Invite your team to your sessions. Anyone who is involved with how fast and how well problems are addressed should be invited to the usability testing sessions. These stakeholders may include the POs, developers or fellow designers. It's a great opportunity for others to see the value of User Research and gives you the opportunity to focus on facilitating the session and not worrying about capturing notes.

Make sure the participant feels comfortable. Be friendly and honest with them. Try making the session feel more like a conversation rather than a formal interview... no ones likes interviews.

Introduce yourself and explain you'll be chatting about. Give them an expectation of what you want to focus the session on so that you can best stay on topic.

Your interviews should be structured, but conversational. Don’t number your questions so that you can more easily break from the order to keep conversations more natural.

Start by asking broad questions. Ask questions about the person’s life, values, and habits, before asking more specific questions that relate directly to your challenge.

While You’re Asking Questions:

Try to memorize your questions. This will allow you to not keep referring back to the page, and makes conversation much more fluid.

Ask good questions. Make sure your questions are clear, open-ended, and focused on the topics you’re investigating.

Ask questions, then pause… If you provide them with answers, they might jump on one of those rather than answer genuinely.

Do: “What’s your favourite thing about ice cream?……"

Dont: “What’s your favourite thing about ice cream? The texture? The sugar? The cone?"

Take clear notes. Make sure to designate a team member take notes during your session so that you're able to capture any good insights from your participant. Highlight questions, ideas and record quotes of what your participant is saying.

Observe the participant's body language. Sometimes what a person says and what their body says are not always the same. Sometimes non-verbal feedback can be more impactful than what they're saying.

If you’re wondering, ask. Something a participant says doesn’t make sense to you? Never heard a term before? Ask. You’ve got one shot to learn from them!

It's not about you - Play dumb. It’s not your goal to demonstrate how much you know, but how much they know. “Help me understand…” and “I’ve never done…” puts the participant into the teacher role and you into the learner role.

Don’t worry about perfection. Just connect with participants by being genuine, making eye contact, using body language, and by listening well.

Capturing the interview:

Be sure to collect both qualitative and quantitative information. For example, you might include a brief survey or a few closed-ended questions, for which the participant chooses a response from a finite set of responses

For Video recording, try using: Silverback, Screenhero or LookBack

For Audio recording, try using: Evernote or Quicktime

For note taking, try using: Evernote, Google Docs, TextEdit

Wrap it up. At the end of your session, thank them for sharing their insights and feedback with you.

Quickly summarize each session. Between sessions, take a few mins to summarize your key learnings from each session - this will save you lots of time digging through lengthy session to find a few key insights.