Your Product Toolbelt | Validation
Your Product Toolbelt is for the Founder, the Product Manager, the curious, and anyone who wants to contribute to the discussion.
My legal team has told me I can’t call the tool Beat* b* Dr*, so I’ll go with headphones because every cool PM wears ’em. The takeaway is to listen with both ears during this step…
As I mentioned in my last post, I skipped over some key design activities. For this installment, please assume that we’ve decided to use UX patterns that already exist in our design library or have justified a new pattern to bring our user journey to life via an interactive prototype. If you’re a newly minted startup, there are more component libraries out there than books in the Hogwarts library!
We need to test the assumptions/choices we’ve made for usability and effectiveness. I’m focusing on one tool that can be used in the validation stage, usability tests. This is the lightest weight and favors startups who don’t have product built yet. I’m also a proponent of advisory boards, alpha / beta testing in the app, and canary testing.
When doing usability testing, first create a test script. Learnings tell us whether to go back to the Ideation phase and update the product or not. Furthermore, surveys at the conclusion of the usability testing session help add color to our findings about user behavior. Let’s dive in!
Step by Step
Step 1: Get ready!
Review your outcome, problem statement, hypothesis, and user journey as a team. Formalize a short background about why you are doing this. Write down any research questions you have, and make a list of the primary things you want to learn; be specific and ensure the objectives are measurable.
Step 2: Get set!
Define the participants: state how many people you’re going to observe, how you’ll recruit participants, and what incentive you’ll use, if needed. Define the criteria for being an eligible candidate and state your expectations of them.
Write down your procedure for the user to accomplish outcomes (do not walk participants through step by step). State whether interviews will be Zoom / Skype or in person. Describe the observational software you’ll be using. Say what devices you’ll use. Explain how users will be onboarded to set context, how the testing process will go, and how you’ll collect any follow up information. Set a time expectation for each portion of the testing to take (onboarding: 5 minutes, testing: 15–20 minutes, debrief: 5–10 minutes).
Define your roles i.e. Facilitator, Observer, Screener/Recruiter/Coordinator.
Step 3: Go!
Once you’ve recruited the number of participants you’re aiming for (aim for three minimally), schedule and conduct the usability tests. Carefully observe the user’s actions and have them tell you their thoughts OUT LOUD. Take a lot of notes, so you can turn qualitative observations into quantitative data.
Toolbelt Takeaways
Know your role for this process. Get the whole team involved because each team member will hear or see something different. Remember that buy-in from the team makes your success.
By the way, we bolded the format you should follow for your usability testing doc:
- Background
- Research questions
- Participants
- Procedure
- Roles
- Notes
IF YOU LEARN NOTHING ELSE!!
- Take copious notes.
- Get the user to talk about what they are thinking out loud.
- Do not alter the plan midway through the set of interviews.
- Learn from the results! Have no ego about if the hypothesis for solving the user problem was correct or not.
Where We’re At
We feel darn good about what we want to deliver to impact outcomes positively. It’s time to stand and deliver!
Stick around next week to discover how to deliver on all your user’s hopes and dreams.
Resources
- Here are the Top 10 React Component Libraries for 2020 from Ogundipe Samuel at LogRocket.
- Writing Tasks for Quantitative and Qualitative Usability Studies from Nielsen Norman will help ensure you don’t inject bias into your user tasks.
- Yuna Orsini gives the ‘pro’ version of this blog post here.
For more reading, check out these previous posts:
