David Hamill’s usability testing tips
2 min readFeb 27, 2020
I’ve kinda stumbled into doing a series of usability testing tips on LinkedIn. I did two and they were quite popular, so now I’m compelled to keep going. I’m going to use this post to collate them all by linking to each of the posts on LinkedIn.
- “What is this screen telling you?”
- “What’s going to happen if you click this?”
- Humanising your observers
- Hypotheses about other users
- Learning your introduction by heart
- The tale of two prototypes
- Observation room rules
- Screener questions for unmoderated tests
- Distance yourself from the design
- Prototypes should be consistent and realistic
- Clear out ‘dead would’
- Test tasks over interactions
- How to handle the T word
- Relax and make mistakes
- Avoid Hansel & Grettel tasks
- Bin your homepage exploration task
- Give participants permission to be careless
- Echoing the participant
- Don’t conflate participants with users
- Play yourself down
- Ignore participants’ views on aesthetics (mostly)
- Consider using interview-based tasks
- Positive issues don’t cancel out negative ones
- “Explain this back to me”
About the author
I’m David Hamill. I help organisations take better decisions through lean but meaningful UX research. If you liked this post, you can read some more below.
If you would like my help to improve your product decisions, then get in touch.
