Recruiting Users for User Testing

Mobile User Personas

I have conducted user testing sessions for several clients, while I was in the services space in different capacities. When I say, 'different capacities', it means some of those were in-house users and some were external. Some testing projects were on a small scale where fewer than 10 users were involved, while others had several scores of users. Irrespective of the scale, few questions that often popped in my head were, "Who are the 'RIGHT' kind of users?", "How many users are good enough?" and so forth. At times, I wondered if the users I hired represented the best representative sample of the real user base spread across globally. Recruiting users is the most difficult and critical part of user testing. Here is how I approached this challenge:

App Context

Suppose, you are recruiting users for testing a 'yet to be released' mobile yoga app that caters to Ashtanga Yoga aspirants. There are several formats of yoga in the market, especially in the western world. Hence, it is important to note that many Ashtanga Yoga practitioners believe that theirs is the most authentic form of yoga ever. Which users from this large community should we consider for user testing of this particular yoga app? Who do we recruit? How do we recruit? On what basis?

Finding the 'RIGHT' kind of users? 

Identifying the right kind of users is a challenging task. Many organizations follow the 'hallway testing' approach where users are randomly chosen as though there were walking on the hallway. These users may not be the best possible sample given diversity factors like geographies, culture, age group, profession, tech-savvy-ness and so forth. It is always good to know who are the users and what are their key characteristics. Without this information, we might just react like horses with blinkers on.

How to recruit users

In above mentioned context, consumers of this app are yoga practitioners, teachers, students and general public. These people may or may not be the users we are looking for. Few of them may not even know how to use a mobile app. Some might be extremely tech-savvy and represent a fairly good sample. Recruiting users depends on asking the right questions depending on the context of the product. The user testing team can design a 'User Recruitment Questionnaire' that helps to screen users and shortlist the most suitable candidates.

User Recruitment Questionnaire

User Recruitment Questionnaire, also known as screener templates, in its simplest form, has three categories:

1. General Questions

This sections asks general questions related to user demography such as:

• Gender
• Age Group
• Occupation / Business Sector
• Nationality
• Income Group

2. Product Context-Specific Questions

This section includes questions specific to yoga as the product under test deals with yoga training:

• Do you teach Yoga?
• Since how long, have you been teaching yoga?
• What specializations do you have in Yoga?
• How often do you teach yoga in a week?

Note: Note that above questions address only the practitioners and teachers at this point. You can include more specifically targeted to recruit yoga students as well.

3. Tech-savvy-ness

• Are you a smartphone user?
• How often do you access internet on your smartphone
• Do you have technical knowledge of using mobile devices?
• What is your smartphone model (Device Name, Manufacturer and Model)
• Have you used any yoga apps in the past?

This recruitment questionnaire can be distributed to potential users via E-mail, Google forms or Online survey. Once user responses are available,we can choose which kind of users we want from this list based on the product context and the user demography we are targeting. 

How many users are good enough

Naive user testing teams start with 1-2 users. Few others say 5-10 users are adequate. I have had good output with 30 users on a few projects. The question really is, 'How many users are good enough?' Jakob Nielsen, a User Advocate and Principal of Nielsen Norman Group has done extensive research in User Testing and thinks that 5 users is a good enough number to start with. As per Nielsen, 5 users can find as many usability / user experience problems as compared to a larger number of participants. 

Regardless of whether user recruitment is done through Online communities / Friends & family / Beta / Private Beta, using this approach can be beneficial. Things might not work as expected the first time around. It might take a couple iterations to implement this approach, make mistakes and then fix them before you start to see positive results. Nevertheless, it's worth trying and failing, than doing nothing at all.

What approach does your team take to recruit users? How well has it worked for you?

Here's what you did wrong - Recoverability Testing and UX Connection

A few weeks ago, I was on the ground floor of my office, when the elevator arrived. I pressed '4' while I continued chatting with my colleague. We reached 4th floor and noticed the lift didn't stop. I was under some imaginary pressure to prove to my colleague that I had pressed '4' indeed, as she stared at me. While I was explaining what just happened, she said, 'The elevator behavior is right. You are wrong." Apparently, if one pressed '4' and the elevator goes to basement or other lower levels and returns to ground floor, the switches are reset. Was it human error or system error? 

Most failures are evil because they tell us, we did the wrong thing. They tell us, that it's something WE did that resulted in failure. They tell us that WE screwed up. According to Don Norman, over 90% of industrial accidents are blamed on human error. You know, if it was 5%, we might believe it. But when it is virtually always, shouldn't we realize that it is something else? The systems were wrong? Perhaps.

Sidney Dekker, believes, that "human error is not a cause of series accidents, but a symptom of trouble, deeper inside a system". We are humans. We cannot be accurate and precise all the time. We are pre-occupied, we are in different states of mind at different times and we have our own way of living our lives and dealing with challenges. As a result, we commit mistakes. Is that really a failure on our part, or the system was not designed intuitively enough, to be able to avoid mistakes from humans or, even, guide the user when mistakes happen.

Murphy's law states that "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong". While things can go wrong, helping users recover from such situations can go a long way in building credibility and loyalty with the user. 

Recoverability of errors is a key element to be considered while designing products. When errors occur, the following five elements can repair the damage (to some degree), the error might have caused to users in first place.

1. Provide visibility to the user of what was done

An error occurs when user did something that the system doesn't know how to handle. When users make mistakes and get no feedback, they're completely lost. For e.g, sending an email that's eaten up by a virus, but the recipient doesn't know a thing about it. When error occurs, it's good to tell the user, exactly what the user did a few moments ago. This way, it might help the user realize whether his actions were right or not and make amends accordingly.

2. Do/Show/Tell the user what went wrong

Once the error has occurred, the user needs to know what really went wrong in the first place. The message displayed to the user should be clear enough to state what actually went wrong. This information is additional to providing visibility above where user is told what he did vs what went wrong after that.

3. Indicate how the user can reverse unwanted outcome

Users are least interested in geeky or innovative error messages. They just want to get out of the error situation as soon as possible. Including error codes like 'Type 2 error number 10000345 occurred' is least informative and/or useful. The error message displayed should tell the user how to reverse the error or what is the next best thing to do, to recover from this error. In short, how can the user go back to base state of the application where he left off before the error occurred is critical for the user to know. Additionally, giving useful advice to the user to fix the problem is good. For e.g, On an e-commerce app, just saying, a book went out of stock is definitely worse when compared to providing 'Notify' feature that notifies you when the book is back in stock.

4. If reversibility is not possible, indicate this to the user

In some cases, reversing an error is not possible. In such a case, it is best to indicate the user to force-close the application and start from scratch or from a specific location in the app. Take an example of password fields. When a user enters the most simplest password, an error message throws with a big list of instructions for a strong password. Instead, if the user is warned upfront about these instructions in the form of a label below the password field, the hassle could be avoided. 

5. Preserve User Data

The app must be able to preserve user's data at all times and never ever corrupt or leak confidential information. Period!

An error that can be made will be made.  For e.g. if you miss-spell 'Murph's Law' in Google, it displays results, but also displays 'Showing results for 'Murphy's Law'. It turns an error into a good feeling. Transforming an error situation to actually helping the user is an intelligent way to deal with an error. Here's a message from Don Norman about error messages: "Error messages punish people for not behaving like machines. It is time we let people behave like people. When a problem arises, we should call it machine error, not human error: the machine was designed wrong, demanding that we conform to its peculiar requirements. It is time to design and build machines that conform to our requirements. Stop confronting us: Collaborate with us."

Graceful Recoverability from errors defines a new avenue for organizations to create great user experiences.

 What do you think?

How to Test User Experience

This article was originally published on TechWell.

User experience (UX) involves the range of emotions a user feels while using a product or service. The product or service may have amazing features and capabilities, but if it fails to delight the user, the person will hardly use it. United Airlines is setting an aspirational target for its customers' UX. It's striving to create an in-flight experience that is “legroom friendly," "online friendly," and "shut-eye friendly.”

Understanding how users feel involves becoming aware of man-machine interactions. This knowledge then can be used to improve the overall user experience. Sadly, many of those who talk about UX as though it’s a set of tools and approaches often forget about the human side of products. A range of tests can be performed while a user is engaging with a piece of software to ensure that the user is never forgotten at any point of the development process.

Emotional Response Test
Users don’t have scripts to follow in one hand while using a product or service in the other hand. By probing users and recording their emotions, ranging from amusement to annoyance, UX teams and testers can gather invaluable information about what makes a product great—and what makes it a nuisance.

User experience professional Robert Hoekman Jr. has a list of tenets on the value of user experience strategy. One of the tenets is "A user’s experience belongs to the user. An experience cannot be designed. It can, however, be influenced. A designer’s job is to be the influencer."

First Impressions Test
What can you tell about people or websites in a short time? A lot. Tests like the Five Second test show that student evaluations given after the students are shown only a few seconds of video are indistinguishable from evaluations from students who actually had the professor for an entire semester. Additionally, visual appeal, navigation, and click tests give inputs about users’ early impressions of products and websites, which can be used to understand what makes a delightful user experience.

User Pain Points
What truly delights users is implicit most times. Bill Gates was absolutely correct when he remarked that unhappy customers are a great source of information for learning about UX. You can gather user pain points from complaints and warnings by talking to users more often and by observing them using websites and software, and then recording their emotions. These days, it’s easy to get customer feedback at the drop of a hat through social media.

As Steve Jobs said, design is "not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Testers can use a variety of heuristics to tell the UX team what does and doesn’t work for users so that the entire project team knows exactly what gives their customers the greatest experience possible.

How do you test User Experience?