Building Trust Through Design for Financial Services

Financial regulations exist for good reason: to protect consumers, prevent fraud, and ensure market stability. But for UX professionals in the financial sector, these necessary guardrails often feel like insurmountable obstacles to creating seamless user experiences. How do we balance strict compliance requirements with the user-friendly experiences consumers increasingly demand?

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The Compliance vs. UX Tension

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The fundamental challenge lies in the seemingly contradictory goals of regulatory compliance and frictionless UX:

• Regulations demand verification steps, disclosures, documentation, and formality
• Good UX principles favor simplicity, speed, clarity, and minimal friction

This tension creates the "compliance paradox": the very features that make financial services trustworthy from a regulatory perspective often make them frustrating from a user perspective.

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Research Driven Compliance Design

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Addressing regulatory challenges in financial UX requires more than intuition, it demands systematic research to understand user perceptions, identify friction points, and validate solutions. Optimal's research platform offers powerful tools to transform compliance from a burden to an experience enhancer:

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Evaluate Information Architecture with Tree Testing

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Regulatory information is often buried in complex navigation structures that users struggle to find when needed:

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Implementation Strategy:

• Test how easily users can find critical compliance information
• Identify optimal placement for regulatory disclosures
• Compare different organizational approaches for compliance documentation

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Test Compliance Flows with First-Click Testing

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Understanding where users instinctively look and click during compliance-critical moments helps optimize these experiences:

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Implementation Strategy:

• Test different approaches to presenting consent requests
• Identify optimal placement for regulatory disclosures
• Evaluate where users look for more information about compliance requirements

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Understand Mental Models with Card Sorting

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Regulatory terminology often clashes with users' mental models of financial services:

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Implementation Strategy:

• Use open card sorts to understand how users categorize compliance-related concepts
• Test terminology comprehension for regulatory language
• Identify user-friendly alternatives to technical compliance language

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Key Regulatory Considerations Affecting Financial UX

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KYC (Know Your Customer) Requirements

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KYC procedures require financial institutions to verify customer identities, a process that can be cumbersome but is essential for preventing fraud and money laundering.

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Design Opportunity: Transform identity verification from a barrier to a trust-building feature by:

• Breaking verification into logical, manageable steps
• Setting clear expectations about time requirements and necessary documents
• Providing progress indicators and save-and-resume functionality
• Explaining the security benefits of each verification step

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Data Privacy Regulations (GDPR, CCPA, etc.)

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Modern privacy frameworks grant users specific rights regarding their data while imposing strict requirements on how financial institutions collect, store, and process personal information.

This poses a specific ux challenge: privacy disclosures and consent mechanisms can overwhelm users with legal language and interrupt core user journeys.

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Design Opportunity: Create privacy experiences that inform without overwhelming:

• Layer privacy information with progressive disclosure
• Use visual design to highlight key privacy choices
• Develop privacy centers that centralize user data controls
• Implement "just-in-time" consent requests that provide context

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AML (Anti-Money Laundering) Compliance

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AML regulations require monitoring unusual transactions and sometimes interrupting user actions for additional verification.

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Design Opportunity: Design for transparency and education:

• Provide clear explanations when additional verification is needed
• Offer multiple verification options when possible
• Create educational content explaining security measures
• Use friction strategically rather than uniformly

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Strategies for Compliance-Centered UX Design

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1. Bring Compliance Teams into the Design Process Early

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Rather than designing an ideal experience and then retrofitting compliance, involve your legal and compliance teams from the beginning. This collaborative approach can identify creative solutions that satisfy both regulatory requirements and user needs.

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2. Design for Transparency, Not Just Disclosure

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Regulations often focus on disclosure, ensuring users have access to relevant information. But disclosure alone doesn't ensure understanding. Focus on designing for true transparency that builds both compliance and comprehension.

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3. Use Progressive Complexity

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Not every user needs the same level of detail. Design interfaces that provide basic information by default but allow users to explore deeper regulatory details if desired.

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4. Transform Compliance into Competitive Advantage

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The most innovative financial companies are finding ways to turn compliance features into benefits users actually appreciate.

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Measuring Success: Beyond Compliance Checklists

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Traditional compliance metrics focus on binary outcomes: did we meet the regulatory requirement or not? For truly successful compliance-centered UX, consider measuring:

• Completion confidence - How confident are users that they've completed regulatory requirements correctly?
• Compliance comprehension - Do users actually understand key regulatory information?
• Trust impact - How do compliance measures affect overall trust in your institution?
• Friction perception - Do users view necessary verification steps as security features or annoying obstacles?

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The financial institutions that will thrive in the coming years will be those that stop viewing regulations as UX obstacles and start seeing them as opportunities to demonstrate trustworthiness, security, and respect for users' rights. By thoughtfully designing compliance into the core experience, rather than bolting it on afterward, we can create financial products that are both legally sound and genuinely user-friendly.

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Remember: Compliance isn't just about avoiding penalties, it's about treating users with the care and respect they deserve when entrusting you with their financial lives. And with the right research tools and methodologies, you can transform regulatory requirements from experience detractors into experience enhancers.

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When it comes to financial services, user experience goes way beyond just making things easy to use. It’s about creating a seamless journey and establishing trust at every touchpoint. Think about it: as we rely more and more on digital banking and financial apps in our everyday lives, we need to feel absolutely confident that our personal information is safe and that the companies managing our money actually know what they're doing. Without that trust foundation, even the most competitive brands will struggle with customer adoption.

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Why Trust Matters More Than Ever

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The stakes are uniquely high in financial UX. Unlike other digital products where a poor experience might result in minor frustration, financial applications handle our life savings, investment portfolios, and sensitive personal data. A single misstep in design can trigger alarm bells for users, potentially leading to lost customers.

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Using UX Research to Measure and Build Trust

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Building high trust experiences requires deep insights into user perceptions, behaviors, and pain points. The best UX platforms can help financial companies spot trust issues and test whether their solutions actually work.

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Identify Trust Issues with Tree Testing

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Tree testing helps financial institutions understand how easily users can find critical information and features:

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• Test information architecture to ensure security features and privacy information are easily discoverable
• Identify confusing terminology that may undermine user confidence
• Compare findability metrics for trust-related content across different user segments

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Optimize for Trustworthy First Impressions with First-Click Testing

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First-click testing helps identify where users naturally look for visual symbols and cues that are associated with security:

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• Test where users instinctively look for security indicators like references to security certifications
• Compare the effectiveness of different visual trust symbols (locks, shields, badges)
• Identify the optimal placement for security messaging across key screens

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Map User Journeys with Card Sorting

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Card sorting helps brands understand how users organize concepts. Reducing confusion, helps your financial brand appear more trustworthy, quickly:

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• Use open card sorts to understand how users naturally categorize security and privacy features
• Identify terminology that resonates with users' perceptions around security

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Qualitative Insights Through Targeted Questions

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Gathering qualitative data through strategically placed questions allows financial institutions to collect rich, timely insights about how much their customers trust their brand:

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• Ask open ended questions about trust concerns at key moments in the testing process
• Gather specific feedback on security terminology understanding and recognition
• Capture emotional responses to different trust indicators

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What Makes a Financial Brand Look Trustworthy?

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Visual Consistency and Professional Polish

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When someone opens your financial app or website, they're making snap judgments about whether they can trust you with their money. It happens in milliseconds, and a lot of that decision comes down to how polished and consistent everything looks.Clean, consistent design sends that signal of stability and attention to detail that people expect when money's involved.

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To achieve this, develop and rigorously apply a solid design system across all digital touchpoints including fonts, colors, button styles, and spacing, it all needs to be consistent across every page and interaction. Even small inconsistencies can make people subconsciously lose confidence.

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Making Security Visible

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Unlike walking into a bank where you can see the vault and security cameras, digital security happens behind the scenes. Users can't see all the protection you've built in unless you make a point of showing them.

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Highlighting your security measures in ways that feel reassuring rather than overwhelming gives people that same sense of "my money is safe here" that they'd get from seeing a bank's physical security.

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From a design perspective, apply this thinking to elements like:

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• Real time login notifications
• Transaction verification steps
• Clear encryption indicators
• Transparent data usage explanations
• Session timeout warnings

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You can test the success of these design elements through preference testing, where you can compare different approaches to security visualization to determine which elements most effectively communicate trust without creating anxiety.

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Making Complex Language Simple

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Financial terminology is naturally complex, but your interface content doesn't have to be. Clear, straightforward language builds trust so it’s important to develop a content strategy that:

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• Explains unavoidable complex terms contextually
• Replaces jargon with plain language
• Provides proactive guidance before errors occur
• Uses positive, confident messaging around security features

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You can test your language and navigation elements by using tree testing to evaluate user understanding of different terminology, measuring success rates for finding information using different labeling options.

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Create an Ongoing Trust Measurement Program

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A user research platform enables financial institutions to implement ongoing trust measurement across the product lifecycle:

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Establish Trust Benchmarks

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Use UX research tools to establish baseline metrics for measuring user trust:

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• Findability scores for security features
• User reported confidence ratings
• Success rates for security related tasks
• Terminology comprehension levels

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Validate Design Updates

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Before implementing changes to critical elements, use quick tests to validate designs:

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• Compare current vs. proposed designs with prototype testing
• Measure findability improvements with tree testing
• Evaluate usability through first-click testing

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Monitor Trust Metrics Over Time

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Create a dashboard of trust metrics that can be tracked regularly:

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• Task success rates for security related activities
• Time-to-completion for verification processes
• Confidence ratings at key security touchpoints

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Cross-Functional Collaboration to Improve Trust

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While UX designers can significantly impact brand credibility, remember that trust is earned across the entire customer experience:

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• Product teams ensure feature promises align with actual capabilities
• Security teams translate complex security measures into user-friendly experiences
• Marketing ensures brand promises align with the actual user experience
• ‍Customer service supports customers when trust issues arise

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Trust as a Competitive Advantage

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In an industry where products and services can often seem interchangeable to consumers, trust becomes a powerful differentiator. By placing trust at the center of your design philosophy and using comprehensive user research to measure and improve trust metrics, you're not just improving user experience, you're creating a foundation for lasting customer relationships in an industry where loyalty is increasingly rare.

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The most successful financial institutions of the future won't necessarily be those with the most features or the slickest interfaces, but those that have earned and maintained user trust through thoughtful UX design built on a foundation of deep user research and continuous improvement.

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Usability testing is one of the best ways to measure how easy and intuitive to use something is by testing it with real people. You can read about the basics of usability testing here.

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Earlier this year, a small team within Optimal Workshop completely redesigned the company blog. More than anything, we wanted to create something that was user-friendly for our readers and would give them a reason to return. I was part of that team, and we ran numerous sessions interviewing regular readers as well as people unfamiliar with our blog. We also ran card sorts, tree tests and other studies to find out all we could about how people search for UX content. Unsurprisingly, one of the most valuable activities we did was usability testing – sitting down with representative users and watching them as they worked through a series of tasks we provided. We asked general questions like “Where would you go to find information about card sorting”, and we also observed them as they searched through our website for learning content.

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By stripping away any barriers between ourselves and our users and observing them as they navigated through our website and learning resources, as well as those of other companies, we were able to build a blog with these people’s behaviors and motivations in mind.

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Usability testing is an invaluable research method, and every user researcher should be able to run sessions effectively. Here are 5 tips for doing so, in no particular order.

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1. Clarify your goals with stakeholders

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Never go into a usability test blind. Before you ever sit down with a participant, make sure you know exactly what you want to get out of the session by writing down your research goals. This will help to keep you focused, essentially giving you a guiding light that you can refer back as you go about the various logistical tasks of your research. But you also need to take this a step further. It’s important to make sure that the people who will utilize the results of your research – your stakeholders – have an opportunity to give you their input on the goals as early as possible.

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If you’re running usability tests with the aim of creating marketing personas, for example, meet with your organization’s marketing team and figure out the types of information they need to create these personas. In some cases, it’s also helpful to clarify how you plan to gather this data, which can involve explaining some of the techniques you’re going to use.

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Lastly, find out how your stakeholders plan to use your findings. If there are a lot of objectives, organize your usability test so you ask the most important questions first. That way, if you end up going off track or you run out of time you’ll have already gathered the most important data for your stakeholders.

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2. Be flexible with your questions

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A list of pre-prepared questions will help significantly when it comes time to sit down and run your usability testing sessions. But while a list is essential, sometimes it can also pay to ‘follow your nose’ and steer the conversation in a (potentially) more fruitful direction.

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How many times have you been having a conversation with a friend over a drink or dinner, only for you both to completely lose track of time and find yourselves discussing something completely unrelated? While it’s not good practice to let your usability testing sessions get off track to this extent, you can surface some very interesting insights by paying close attention to a user’s behavior and answers during a testing session and following interesting leads.

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Ideally, and with enough practice, you’ll be able to answer your core (prepared) questions and ask a number of other questions that spring to mind during the session. This is a skill that takes time to master, however.

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3. Write a script for your sessions

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While a usability test script may sound like a fancy name for your research questions, it’s actually a document that’s much more comprehensive. If you prepare it correctly (we’ll explain how below), you’ll have a document that you can use to capture in-depth insights from your participants.

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Here are some of the key things to keep in mind when putting together your script:

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• Write a friendly introduction – It may sound obvious, but taking the time to come up with a friendly, warm introduction will get your sessions off to a much better start. The bonus of writing it down is that you’re far less likely to forget it!
• Ask to record the session – It’s important to record your session (whether through video or audio), as you’ll want to go back later and analyze any details you may have missed. This means asking for explicit permission to record participants. In addition to making them feel more comfortable, it’s just good practice to do so.
• Allocate time for the basics – Don’t dive into the complex questions first, use the first few minutes to gather basic data. This could be things like where they work and their familiarity with your organization and/or product.
• Encourage them to explain their thought process – “I’d like you to explain what you’re doing as you make your way through the task”. This simple request will give you an opportunity to ask follow-up questions that you otherwise may not have thought to ask.
• Let participants know that they’re not being tested – Whenever a participant steps into the room for a test, they’re naturally going to feel like they’re being tested. Explain that you’re testing the product, not them. It’s also helpful to let them know that there are no right or wrong answers. This is an important step if you want to keep them relaxed.

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It’s often easiest to have a document with your script printed out and ready to go for each usability test.

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4. Take advantage of software

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You’d never see a builder without a toolbox full of a useful assortment of tools. Likewise, software can make the life of a user research that much easier. The paper-based ways of recording information are still perfectly valid, but introducing custom tools can make both the logistics of user research and the actual sessions themselves much easier to manage.

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Take a tool like Calendly, for example. This is a powerful piece of scheduling software that almost completely takes over the endless back and forth of scheduling usability tests. Calendly acts as a middle man between you and your participants, allowing you to set the times you’re free to host usability tests, and then allowing participants to choose a session that suits them from these times.

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Our very own Reframer makes the task of running usability tests and analyzing insights that much easier. During your sessions, you can use Reframer to take comprehensive notes and apply tags like “positive” or “struggled” to different observations. Then, after you’ve concluded your tests, Reframer’s analysis function will help you understand wider themes that are present across your participants.

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There’s another benefit to using a tool like Reframer. Keeping all of your notes in place will mean you easily pull up data from past research sessions whenever you need to.

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5. Involve others

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Usability tests (and user interviews, for that matter) are a great opportunity to open up research to your wider organization. Whether it’s stakeholders, other members of your immediate team or even members of entirely different departments, giving them the chance to sit down with users will show them how their products are really being used. If nothing else, these sessions will help those within your organization build empathy with the people they’re building products for.

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There are quite a few ways to bring others in, such as:

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• To help you set up the research – This can be a helpful exercise for both you (the researcher) and the people you’re bringing in. Collaborate on the overarching research objectives, ask them what types of results they’d like to see and what sort of tasks they think could be used to gather these results.
• As notetakers – Having a dedicated notetaker will make your life as a researcher significantly easier. This means you’ll have someone to record any interesting observations while you focus on running the session. Just let them know what types of notes you’d like to see.
• To help you analyze the data – Once you’ve wrapped up your usability testing sessions, bring others in to help analyze the findings. There’s a good chance that an outside perspective will catch something you may miss. Also, if you’re bringing stakeholders into the analysis stage, they'll get a clearer picture of what it means and where the data came from.

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There are myriad other tips and best practices to keep in mind when usability testing, many of which we cover in our introductory page. Important considerations include taking good quality notes, carefully managing participants during the session (not giving them too much guidance) and remaining neutral throughout when answering their questions. If you feel like we’ve missed any really important points, feel free to leave a comment!

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Read more

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• Usability testing 101 – About to run your first usability test? Check out our handy 101 guide. You’ll also learn how you can use our qualitative research tool Reframer most effectively.
• What is usability testing? – Learn about the concepts of usability testing and how you can develop a plan for your own testing sessions.
• How to run fast and affordable usability tests with hard-to-reach, high-earning users – Finding the right participants for your usability tests can seem pretty tricky. Here’s how you can get the right people for your particular project.