W4D1: Usability Testing

We’ll conduct a quick usability test of a competitor of your team’s project, based on the tasks you’ve identified in Milestone 1.

Instructions

In your project teams:

1. Come up with a list of essential tasks that you will have users perform.
   • Aim for 3-6 tasks as ideas, then pick the most important and test-able 2 or 3.
   • Use the needs and tasks that you identified in Milestone 1 as a starting point.
   • But make them more specific. It should be easy to tell whether the user has completed the task or not.
   • Task examples for a shopping app could be: “Put more than 6 items into a shopping cart and finish the purchase.”, “Put two items into a shopping cart, remove both, and add a new item.”, and “Cancel your purchase in the middle of a payment process.”.
   • But avoid functionality-focused examples such as “Use the ‘add’ button and put 6 items into a shopping cart”.
2. Choose a competitor product to test. For example, if you’re designing a new calendar app, you might test Google Calendar or the iOS Calendar app.
3. Since we’re doing this in-class, we can’t get actual users, so: choose someone on your team to be the “user” for the test.
   • They should try to take on the perspective of one of the people you interviewed in Milestone 1.
   • Ideally this person has not used the competitor product you have chosen.
4. Run the test. Take notes.
   • Remind the “user” that you’re testing the system, not them.
   • Remind the user to think out loud.
5. After the test, reflect on what you learned about the usefulness and usability of the competitor product.
   • What did you learn about the tasks you chose? Do you need to revise your tasks so that they better reflect the needs of your actual users?
   • What did you learn about the competitor product? Any insights that might help you in your own design?
   • Do you need to revise your Milestone 1 personas, POV, or user needs/insights based on what you learned?