Usability Testing

I was a member of a team of 4 user experience researchers on a project to help a startup still in an incubator. Their products were still very early in development and they had been making very significant changes to their core functionality on a weekly basis. My team had been in contact with solely the founders who were neither the developers or designers of their educational iPad app.

How do you help empower an early startup with user feedback?

The client was a very early stage startup with limited resources provided by the on campus incubator. They did not have a designer easily accessible to provide a prototype of their app, only screenshots. As they had no existing customers, my team also needed to recruit participants to act as proxies for their assumptive customers: students and educators.

Approach

Upon creating personas of the administrator and student, my team found a college campus to be a suitable location to recruit participants from. We chose to recruit college freshmen for the user mode and graduate students for the administrator. The participants were recruited with different screener questionnaires. Our evaluation tasks were minimized to allow for the tasks to take an estimated 30 minutes per session.

I created “stage markers” in tape on the testing desk that stayed in frame of the web camera used to film each usability test.

Results

My research team had practiced crafting and manipulating the paper prototypes to gain useful insights for our startup client.

Impact

Though not all of the users we tested were very excited to continue using the product beyond our user test, my team did an excellent job of clarifying some of their gripes. Our job was to help our clients see beyond the app to see what drives their users. The paper prototype was a great tool that the client team had never expected could show them how people could use their app. They had taken the results of the user test and told my team they would work hard on implementing some of our functionality suggestions. I found the experience very enlightening to the importance of communicating goals.