- Before you launch an app, you've gotta make sure
that people can actually use it.
That it's not mystifying.
Just because having a bizarre swipe interface
worked for SnapChat, doesn't mean it'll work for you.
And basically the app I'm working on
is a little simple because it's just for the show.
It's one button right now
and might not be the best demonstration.
I'm not too worried about its usability.
But this isn't the case for most apps.
All of your users have to be able to use it.
Even the drunk ones.
This is where user testing comes in.
User testing helps you understand
how people use your product and how it'll be received.
Do folks use it for the same purpose
you had in mind when you designed it?
Do they understand how to use it?
Is it as intuitive and easy as you think it is?
Particularly for someone who's never seen it before.
And can absolutely anyone use your app,
even if they're tired and emotional?
There is a reason I'm in this bar.
In March 2015, front-end developer
and whiskey aficionado Richard Littauer
created his website "The User is Drunk".
Your website should be so simple,
a drunk person could use it.
Which is true, you should ideally make your app
so intuitive that it can be used by anyone
anywhere, in almost any conscious condition.
But there is more to it than just getting
your friends around and giving them some alcohol.
In this episode let's figure out how to user test,
how to work out the questions and scenarios
you should create to see if your app is actually usable.
And then how to figure out if and how
you should correct your course.
How to figure out what your testers actually want
so you can give your app
the best chance of success at launch.
Let's get testing.
That would have been a lot more impressive
if it wasn't water.
- What you really want is an unbiased opinion
where people who don't know you
might then have more honest opinions
about what you've built.
Just to go out to go out to people that you don't know.
Often times I think guerrilla research
is probably a good method.
- You want to get to a sort of deeper understanding
of how it helps them.
When you're doing more in-depth research,
you can use a laddering technique
where you keep asking why and you get
further down into the question
where you would start to identify a need
or a problem that you're trying to solve.
- If you're designing a user testing session.
You're actually getting people in probably.
What are the mistakes that people make, there?
What are the pitfalls?
- You should write a script.
So, it doesn't have to be a highly detailed script,
but you should know, it depends on how much time you have,
but you should know the things that you want to find out.
So you should write down on some pieces of paper,
what are the five most important things you need to know?
What are your assumptions?
And they can be really high-level like I mentioned before,
or they could be really particular.
- This is something I found out during prototyping
that something I thought was vitally important
actually most people didn't care about.
And several people asked for the same change
or the same new feature, which is something
I hadn't even thought about at the start.
And I'm guessing the more user testing you do,
the more you find those patterns.
- It's definitely about finding patterns
because you're always going to have people
with their own particular take on something
and you need to collect enough interviews,
enough data points to see that it's either a pattern
or it's just one particular person's opinion on something.
And so we usually do, I think, five to six interviews
before we start seeing a pattern emerge.
It's not about proving your idea correct.
We call it usability testing, but it's not a test.
You're not trying to pass a test.
You're trying to actually learn more
about what you've made.
I'm used to conducting interviews like this
where I'm sort of doing the editing in my head
"I know where this wants to go,
"and I know I have to push someone towards the answer."
Nope, I need them to be entirely themselves
with their opinion.
- You find if you let people talk, and you leave silences
- [Host] Yes.
(all laughing)
I filled that silence! - You filled the void
with more input, and that's what you want.
You want their honest input about the thing.
- Thank you so much for coming in today.
We're testing a new and really simple app
that we're developing.
This is just a basic version.
There are no right or wrong answers.
If it turns out you can't use it
or if you don't want it that is my problem,
the app's problem, not yours.
It would really help if you would give
as much information as possible
and ask any questions you need to.
First of all, just a couple of questions.
What phone do you use?
- I use an iPhone 8.
- I have a Oneplus 5T.
- So you're Android? - Yeah, yeah.
- iPhone.
- And what kind of things do you use your phone for?
- Social media.
- Browsing the web, email mainly, and navigation.
- Test number one, can you open the app
called "Things You Might Not Know"?
Okay that's a tick, that's open.
Can you find out an interesting fact using the app?
- Yes, well it's giving me a fact.
I don't know how interesting it is for me,
but it's giving me a fact.
- Can you find out more than one interesting fact?
- So at the bottom of the screen here it says
"Swipe up for something more interesting"
so let me try that.
- Yeah, so a swipe motion.
- Before we get into what's on-screen
and what's in the content there,
how'd you find it to use?
- I thought the text at the bottom which said
"Swipe for something more interesting"
was a bit small.
- Very simple, in terms of the immediate kind of
call to action of what it's asking you.
- Pretty simple apart from, I mean obviously I made a slight
misunderstanding by misreading the sort of swipe.
- That's the app's problem, not yours, 100%.
How interesting were the facts on there?
- Not super interesting because it's just
you're near this place, you're near that place.
- Quite interesting because I'm quite new
to Brighton as well, so I don't know much about it.
So I think, do you get quite a few facts?
Because I only swiped once,
so I got quite a basic fact to begin with.
- Would you use or download that?
- Maybe
- Potentially, because it helps you explore things
that you may not know.
- Possibly. Possibly depending on where I was
and the type of facts it will give to me.
- First impressions then.
Haven't connected the dots yet,
but need to work on something for people
who already know their area.
The folks who said they like it
and might get something like the final version of it,
they were all the people who weren't local,
or had just moved to the area.
So it's great but you don't
generally download an app just for holidays.
You need something that works all the time.
So that's one point.
The facts need to be more interesting.
We need to put up something that is more
than just the closest Wikipedia article.
Or maybe it will be the closest,
but we need to somehow pull something out of that
and put it as an important bit on the screen.
But it's not a complete disaster.
I thought this was going to be a complete disaster
and it's not a complete disaster.
The facts that we've got aren't great,
cause I'm guessing we're just pulling in
the closest Wikipedia article?
- Yeah, they're doing a nearby search
pulling the nearby ones,
and we're just getting I think the first image
from the page and a little extra summary
of the information displayed on the page.
- So I know this is an MVP, Minimum Viable Product,
we're just doing the basics, but is there any way
that we can algorithmically extract
interesting out of that.
This intake of breath...
which is, it's like the time someone asked me for like
"Can you just do this?"
No, okay.
- Well interesting is also quite subjective, so...
- Cause I know there's been research
into machine learning summarization.
- There are probably tools that we could use
to do some sort of analysis on the text that's there
on the whole page and pick out the most "interesting" fact,
but probably not for our MVP.
- I'd have to train the model.
I wouldn't have to train the model,
I'd have to hire some people to go through
a load of extracts from Wikipedia
and mark whatever's interesting and hope
that the machine learning model worked.
And you'd have to bake it into the app somehow?
- Yeah, we'd have to work it out (laughing).
- It's not going to happen for an MVP is it?
- I don't think so (laughing).
- So what have we learned?
Well, quite a lot, I've got five cards this time.
First of all, user testing is essential,
even if you don't have a lot of time or budget,
you should still do it.
And it might be testing in the street
or remote testing with users in their own homes,
but either way it will show you the parts of your app idea
that people don't understand,
or that they find hard to use.
And it'll make your app
so much more effective when you launch.
Second, write a script for your user testing session
but be prepared to go off-script, too.
A script will help you consistently
go through all the elements of the app
that you want to test with the user.
And it'll help you explain
what you need them to do at each stage.
It will help you be more consistent,
so the results will be comparable.
But each user will give you new insight into your app
so feel free to improvise if you need to.
Third, look for patterns in your results.
Sit down with your team, cross-reference everything,
and look for those patterns in behavior.
Are there specific parts of the app that people
just didn't understand, or that they find difficult to use?
Were there similar "Oh!" moments
when users really understood and appreciated your app?
Fourth, look at what people do as well as what they say.
A lot of users struggle to tell
you exactly what they think.
They might want to be polite
or they might just not have the technical language
to explain their problem.
If you're in the middle of a user testing session
where the user isn't doing the best job
of articulating their thoughts or feelings,
focus on their non-verbal behaviors
like posture and hand gestures and facial expressions.
Finally, user testing is all about listening.
It's not marketing.
You are very, definitely not trying
to sell your app idea to the user.
You're a moderator.
Don't interrupt their flow
by offering them guidance or advice.
You wouldn't be there to do this in the real world,
so resist the urge to offer advice from the sidelines.
If you take the time to really listen,
you'll often get surprising insights
that you would have missed.
And those little surprises can tell you a lot.
Next time, how to make money with your app.