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David Hamill’s usability testing tips

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.

1. “What is this screen telling you?”
2. “What’s going to happen if you click this?”
3. Humanising your observers
4. Hypotheses about other users
5. Learning your introduction by heart
6. The tale of two prototypes
7. Observation room rules
8. Screener questions for unmoderated tests
9. Distance yourself from the design
10. Prototypes should be consistent and realistic
11. Clear out ‘dead would’
12. Test tasks over interactions
13. How to handle the T word
14. Relax and make mistakes
15. Avoid Hansel & Grettel tasks
16. Bin your homepage exploration task
17. Give participants permission to be careless
18. Echoing the participant
19. Don’t conflate participants with users
20. Play yourself down
21. Ignore participants’ views on aesthetics (mostly)
22. Consider using interview-based tasks
23. Positive issues don’t cancel out negative ones
24. “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.