Hands-on Guerilla User Testing
Add to calendarAnyone who’s seen a user trying to get to grips with their application knows what a humbling experience it can be. No matter your design experience there’s no substitute for testing with actual users. But the whole user testing process can seem daunting & costly in terms of time, effort & materials. Seeing this Jakob Nielsen proposed a lightweight approach, ‘Guerilla User Testing’, in the mid-nineties. It emphasized what could be done on limited resources by a team committed to providing a decent user experience. Marc & Luke share over 20 years of experience applying this type of technique.
We would suggest the following format for the 90 mins.
[20 mins] Introduction to the basic ideas
[25 mins] Hands-on user testing (Pt 1)
- Participants form into small groups (3-5 people)
- Participants discuss their participant and task selection
- Participants conduct an initial round of user-testing
- Participants consolidate feedback
[10 mins] Group discussion - Topics driven by groups, can cover both the user testing process and the example application
[20 mins] Hands-on user testing (Pt 2)
- Participants form into small groups (3-5 people)
- Participants conduct an initial round of user-testing
- Participants consolidate feedback
[15 mins] Wrap-up
- Share what worked / what didn’t / what we’d do next time
- Opportunity for questions
- Where user testing can sit in an Agile development cycle
- How to select participants
- How to identify and draw up user tasks for testing
- How to prepare test materials and the test environment
- How to facilitate a user test
- How to consolidate end-user feedback and incorporate it as part of ongoing development