What your customers REALLY think: Incorporating usability testing into agile

Preview:

DESCRIPTION

I did this talk for Agile Africa 2014 You can’t know whether your agile project is maximising is impact unless you gather customer feedback. But the feedback that comes to you is not always the full story. This talk looks at why you should actively go an get user feedback with usability testing, and how to go about doing your first usability test.

Citation preview

What your users really think Incorporating user testing and research into Agile

Phil Barrett • Flow Interactive • Agile Africa 2014

UX design, research and strategy London & Cape Town !Since 1998 !

Hello.

You check out some new digital product.

You“Meh.”

You“Meh.”

Dear sir/madam !I recently visited your new website. I must confess that at first, I found it a bit difficult to understand the value you were offering. !I wasn’t sure if it was because I was not part of your target market, or if you were still working out exactly what was the best thing to offer. !I persevered and after a while realised that you were actually providing a potential useful service. I think it could be extremely profitable if you simply make the following changes: !1.Ensure that I am not required to register before

Not you

Who sends you feedback?

No opinion Tentative opinion Strong opinion

Not using

Trying out

Casual user

Evangelist/Beta group

User

Who sends you feedback?

Feedback

Silence

No opinion Tentative opinion Strong opinion

Not using

Trying out

Casual user

Evangelist/Beta group

User

Missing feedback breaks Agile’s awesomeness

Build

Learn

Measure

Agile projects deliver gradual, incremental change

so it’s easy to miss overall user impact.

Flickr: Lars ploughman

Web analytics, tracking

What do people do with the product? !Hard data.

Split testing

What will people do if we try something else? !Experimentation.

The learn stack

UX testing sessions

Why do people do that? !Causes, inspiration, direction, prediction outside of known situations. !Innovation.

F2F user testing gives you a blast of reality

I don’t need no stinkin’ feedback

• I know what people want

• My software is clearly good. I mean: look!

• Customers don’t know what they want

Flickr: Daniel D

ionne

I know what people want

You’re much better with software than most of your users

Website tasks:the slowest 25% of users take

2.4 timesas long as the fastest 25% of users

Your usersYou

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/variability-in-user-performance/

Econ: Considers, calculates, makes optimal decisions

Human: Emotions, shortcuts and irrationality

Real people are unpredictable

My software is good: look!

Dan Ariely did an experiment.

With origami frogs.

They were hard to make and most people did a bad job.

How much would people bid for their own frogs?

And the frogs of others? And expert -made frogs?

Flickr: Todd Jordan/Tojosan

Flickr: Nanim

o

We think the things we make are expert quality.

• Average bid for expert-made frog: 27¢

• Average bid for own frog: 23¢

• Average bid by someone else for that same frog: ¢5c

Even when they are not.

The 9x effect

Executives, overvalue their own innovations...

Companies overweight the new product’s benefits by a factor of

9

John T. Gourville

Harvard Business School

3

Consumers overweight the incumbent product’s benefits by a factor of

3

Customers don’t know what they want

Humans are bad at imagining the future

Understand the jobs to be done

“To design an easy-to-use interface, pay

attention to what users do, not what they say.

!Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user

speculations about future behaviour.

Jakob Nielsen NNGroup

Use observation

“There is a direct correlation between the number of hours each team member is exposed directly to real users and the improvements we see in the designs. !It's the closest thing we've found to a silver bullet.

Jared Spool UIE

Let’s make it incredibly easy

Doing a usability test

1. Get an interface. List key tasks.

2. Ask someone new to try doing the tasks, and think aloud.

3. Don’t interfere.

Just write thingsdown.

!Wait for 4 seconds.

4. Q. “Is this right?” A. “What do you think?”

!!Be weird but friendly.

5.

Record everything so you and your team can review the issues.

Open questions and storytelling

Do you like this? What do you think?

Do you understand this? What is this for?

Does this annoy you? How does this make you feel?

Do you want this? When will you use this?

Do you usually do this? Tell me the story of the last time you did something like this…

Get users from…

• The next desk • The canteen • Your forums • Market research recruiters

Baby steps: Hall testing

You don’t need working code

Do usability tests in every sprint

Just tell the recruiter to get you “5 users every thursday.”

Evaluate

Implement

Design and analysis Design and analysis

Implement

Design and analysis

Evaluate

Implement

Evaluate Evaluate

Design and analysis

Implement

Test a mix of stuff

Past FuturePresent

Interviews about past

experiences

Testing working software

Testing mockups and concepts

Oh my goodness, stakeholders love it!

“The next step involved putting users in a room and watching them use Obox. It was one of the most eye opening experiences of our professional careers.

Watching a layman use your product will blow your mind. You cannot even begin to imagine how your users interact with it.

Obox blogged about their usability testing experience

David Perel CEO of Obox

§ Get a team mate who likes talking to people.

§ Get a target user. § Ask the user to do the 3

things the software is for. § Record it.

Your MVUT

Flickr: Lali Masriera/visualpanic

Thanks!Phil Barrett • phil@userexperience.co.za • @philbuktoo

Flickr: Lars ploughman

Recommended