May 4, 2015
4 min

Collating your user testing notes

It’s been a long day. Scratch that - it’s been a long week! Admit it. You loved every second of it.

Twelve hour days, the mad scramble to get the prototype ready in time, the stakeholders poking their heads in occasionally, dealing with no-show participants and the excitement around the opportunity to speak to real life human beings about product or service XYZ. Your mind is exhausted but you are buzzing with ideas and processing what you just saw. You find yourself sitting in your war room with several pages of handwritten notes and with your fellow observers you start popping open individually wrapped lollies leftover from the day’s sessions. Someone starts a conversation around what their favourite flavour is and then the real fun begins. Sound familiar? Welcome to the post user testing debrief meeting.

How do you turn those scribbled notes and everything rushing through your mind into a meaningful picture of the user experience you just witnessed? And then when you have that picture, what do you do next? Pull up a bean bag, grab another handful of those lollies we feed our participants and get comfy because I’m going to share my idiot-proof, step by step guide for turning your user testing notes into something useful.

Let’s talk

Get the ball rolling by holding a post session debrief meeting while it’s all still fresh your collective minds. This can be done as one meeting at the end of the day’s testing or you could have multiple quick debriefs in between testing sessions. Choose whichever options works best for you but keep in mind this needs to be done at least once and before everyone goes home and forgets everything. Get all observers and facilitators together in any meeting space that has a wall like surface that you can stick post its to - you can even use a window! And make sure you use real post its - the fake ones fall off!

Mark your findings (Tagging)

Before you put sharpie to post it, it’s essential to agree as a group on how you will tag your observations. Tagging the observations now will make the analysis work much easier and help you to spot patterns and themes. Colour coding the post its is by far the simplest and most effective option and how you assign the colours is entirely up to you. You could have a different colour for each participant or testing session, you could have different colours to denote participant attributes that are relevant to your study eg senior staff and junior staff, or you could use different colours to denote specific testing scenarios that were used. There’s many ways you could carve this up and there’s no right or wrong way. Just choose the option that suits you and your team best because you’re the ones who have to look at it and understand it. If you only have one colour post it eg yellow, you could colour code the pen colours you use to write on the notes or include some kind of symbol to help you track them.

Processing the paper (Collating)

That pile of paper is not going to process itself! Your next job as a group is to work through the task of transposing your observations to post it notes. For now, just stick them to the wall in any old way that suits you. If you’re the organising type, you could group them by screen or testing scenario. The positioning will all change further down the process, so at this stage it’s important to just keep it simple. For issues that occur repeatedly across sessions, just write them down on their own post its- doubles will be useful to see further down the track.In addition to  holding a debrief meetings, you also need to round up everything that was used to capture the testing session/s. And I mean EVERYTHING.

Handwritten notes, typed notes, video footage and any audio recordings need to be reviewed just in case something was missed. Any handwritten notes should be typed to assist you with the completion of the report. Don’t feel that you have to wait until the testing is completed before you start typing up your notes because you will find they pile up very quickly and if your handwriting is anything like mine…. Well let’s just say my short term memory is often required to pick up the slack and even that has it’s limits. Type them up in between sessions where possible and save each session as it’s own document. I’ll often use the testing questions or scenario based tasks to structure my typed notes and I find that makes it really easy to refer back to.Now that you’ve processed all the observations, it’s time to start sorting your observations to surface behavioural patterns and make sense of it all.

Spotting patterns and themes through affinity diagramming

Affinity diagramming is a fantastic tool for making sense of user testing observations. In fact it’s just about my favourite way to make sense of any large mass of information. It’s an engaging and visual process that grows and evolves like a living creature taking on a life of its own. It also builds on the work you’ve just done which is a real plus!By now, testing is over and all of your observations should all be stuck to a wall somewhere. Get everyone together again as a group and step back and take it all in. Just let it sit with you for a moment before you dive in. Just let it breathe. Have you done that? Ok now as individuals working at the same time, start by grouping things that you think belong together. It’s important to just focus on the content of the labels and try to ignore the colour coded tagging at this stage, so if session one was blue post its don’t group all the blue ones together just because they’re all blue! If you get stuck, try grouping by topic or create two groups eg issues and wins and then chunk the information up from there.

You will find that the groups will change several times over the course of the process  and that’s ok because that’s what it needs to do.While you do this, everyone else will be doing the same thing - grouping things that make sense to them.  Trust me, it’s nowhere near as chaotic as it sounds! You may start working as individuals but it won’t be long before curiosity kicks in and the room is buzzing with naturally occurring conversation.Make sure you take a step back regularly and observe what everyone else is doing and don’t be afraid to ask questions and move other people’s post its around- no one owns it! No matter how silly something may seem just put it there because it can be moved again. Have a look at where your tagged observations have ended up. Are there clusters of colour? Or is it more spread out? What that means will depend largely on how you decided to tag your findings. For example if you assigned each testing session its own colour and you have groups with lot’s of different colours in them you’ll find that the same issue was experienced by multiple people.Next, start looking at each group and see if you can break them down into smaller groups and at the same time consider the overall picture for bigger groups eg can the wall be split into say three high level groups.Remember, you can still change your groups at anytime.

Thinning the herd (Merging)

Once you and your team are happy with the groups, it’s time to start condensing the size of this beast. Look for doubled up findings and stack those post its on top of each other to cut the groups down- just make sure you can still see how many there were. The point of merging is to condense without losing anything so don’t remove something just because it only happened once. That one issue could be incredibly serious. Continue to evaluate and discuss as a group until you are happy. By now clear and distinct groups of your observations should have emerged and at a glance you should be able to identify the key findings from your study.

A catastrophe or a cosmetic flaw? (Scoring)

Scoring relates to how serious the issues are and how bad the consequences of not fixing them are. There are arguments for and against the use of scoring and it’s important to recognise that it is just one way to communicate your findings.I personally rarely use scoring systems. It’s not really something I think about when I’m analysing the observations. I rarely rank one problem or finding over another. Why? Because all data is good data and it all adds to the overall picture.I’ve always been a huge advocate for presenting the whole story and I will never diminish the significance of a finding by boosting another. That said, I do understand the perspective of those who place metrics around their findings. Other designers have told me they feel that it allows them to quantify the seriousness of each issue and help their client/designer/boss make decisions about what to do next.We’ve all got our own way of doing things, so I’ll leave it up to you to choose whether or not you score the issues. If you decide to score your findings there are a number of scoring systems you can use and if I had to choose one, I quite like Jakob Nielsen’s methodology for the simple way it takes into consideration multiple factors. Ultimately you should choose the one that suits your working style best.

Let’s say you did decide to score the issues. Start by writing down each key finding on it’s own post it and move to a clean wall/ window. Leave your affinity diagram where it is. Divide the new wall in half: one side for wins eg findings that indicate things that tested well and the other for issues. You don’t need to score the wins but you do need to acknowledge what went well because knowing what you’re doing well is just as important as knowing where you need to improve. As a group (wow you must be getting sick of each other! Make sure you go out for air from time to time!) score the issues based on your chosen methodology.Once you have completed this entire process you will have everything you need to write a kick ass report.

What could possibly go wrong? (and how to deal with it)

No process is perfect and there are a few potential dramas to be aware of:

People jumping into solution mode too early

In the middle of the debrief meeting, someone has an epiphany. Shouts of We should move the help button! or We should make the yellow button smaller! ring out and the meeting goes off the rails.I’m not going to point fingers and blame any particular role because we’ve all done it, but it’s important to recognise that’s not why we’re sitting here. The debrief meeting is about digesting and sharing what you and the other observers just saw. Observing and facilitating user testing is a privilege. It’s a precious thing that deserves respect and if you jump into solution mode too soon, you may miss something. Keep the conversation on track by appointing a team member to facilitate the debrief meeting.

Storage problems

Handwritten notes taken by multiple observers over several days of testing adds up to an enormous pile of paper. Not only is it a ridiculous waste of paper but they have to be securely stored for three months following the release of the report. It’s not pretty. Typing them up can solve that issue but it comes with it’s own set of storage related hurdles. Just like the handwritten notes, they need to be stored securely. They don’t belong on SharePoint or in the share drive or any other shared storage environment that can be accessed by people outside your observer group. User testing notes are confidential and are not light reading for anyone and everyone no matter how much they complain. Store any typed notes in a limited access storage solution that only the observers have access to and if anyone who shouldn’t be reading them asks, tell them that they are confidential and the integrity of the research must be preserved and respected.

Time issues

Before the storage dramas begin, you have to actually pick through the mountain of paper. Not to mention the video footage, and the audio and you have to chase up that sneaky observer who disappeared when the clock struck 5. All of this takes up a lot of time. Another time related issue comes in the form of too much time passing in between testing sessions and debrief meetings. The best way to deal with both of these issues  is to be super organised and hold multiple smaller debriefs in between sessions where possible. As a group, work out your time commitments before testing begins and have a clear plan in place for when you will meet.  This will prevent everything piling up and overwhelming you at the end.

Disagreements over scoring

At the end of that long day/week we’re all tired and discussions around scoring the issues can get a little heated. One person’s showstopper may be another person’s mild issue. Many of the ranking systems use words as well as numbers to measure the level of severity and it’s easy to get caught up in the meaning of the words and ultimately get sidetracked from the task at hand. Be proactive and as a group set ground rules upfront for all discussions. Determine how long you’ll spend discussing an issue and what you will do in the event that agreement cannot be reached. People want to feel heard and they want to feel like their contributions are valued. Given that we are talking about an iterative process, sometimes it’s best just to write everything down to keep people happy and merge and cull the list in the next iteration. By then they’ve likely had time to reevaluate their own thinking.

And finally...

We all have our own ways of making sense of our user testing observations and there really is no right or wrong way to go about it. The one thing I would like to reiterate is the importance of collaboration and teamwork. You cannot do this alone, so please don’t try. If you’re a UX team of one, you probably already have a trusted person that you bounce ideas off. They would be a fantastic person to do this with. How do you approach this process? What sort of challenges have you faced? Let me know in the comments below.

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Does the first click really matter? Treejack says yes

In 2009, Bob Bailey and Cari Wolfson published apaper entitled “FirstClick Usability Testing: A new methodology for predicting users’ success on tasks”. They’d analyzed 12 scenario-based user tests and concluded that the first click people make is a strong leading indicator of their ultimate success on a given task. Their results were so compelling that we got all excited and created Chalkmark, a tool especially for first click usability testing. It occurred to me recently that we’ve never revisited the original premise for ourselves in any meaningful way.

And then one day I realized that, as if by magic, we’re sitting on quite possibly the world’s biggest database of tree test results. I wondered: can we use these results to back up Bob and Cari’s findings (and thus the relevanceof Chalkmark)?Hell yes we can.So we’ve analyzed tree testing data from millions of responses in Treejack, and we're thrilled (relieved) that it confirmed the findings from the 2009 paper — convincingly.

What the original study found

Bob and Cari analyzed data from twelve usability studies on websites and products ‘with varying amounts and types of content, a range of subject matter complexity, and distinct user interfaces’. They found that people were about twice as likely to complete a task successfully if they got their first click right, than if they got it wrong:

If the first click was correct, the chances of getting the entire scenario correct was 87%If the first click was incorrect, the chances of eventually getting the scenario correct was only 46%

What our analysis of tree testing data has found

We analyzed millions of tree testing responses in our database. We've found that people who get the first click correct are almost three times as likely to complete a task successfully:

If the first click was correct, the chances of getting the entire scenario correct was 70%If the first click was incorrect, the chances of eventually getting the scenario correct was 24%

To give you another perspective on the same data, here's the inverse:

If the first click was correct, the chances of getting the entire scenario incorrect was 30%If the first click was incorrect, the chances of getting the whole scenario incorrect was 76%

How Treejack measures first clicks and task success

Bob and Cari proved the usefulness of the methodology by linking two key metrics in scenario-based usability studies: first clicks and task success. Chalkmark doesn't measure task success — it's up to the researcher to determine as they're setting up the study what constitutes 'success', and then to interpret the results accordingly. Treejack does measure task success — and first clicks.

In a tree test, participants are asked to complete a task by clicking though a text-only version of a website hierarchy, and then clicking 'I'd find it here' when they've chosen an answer. Each task in a tree test has a pre-determined correct answer — as was the case in Bob and Cari's usability studies — and every click is recorded, so we can see participant paths in detail.

Thus, every single time a person completes an individual Treejack task, we record both their first click and whether they are successful or not. When we came to test the 'correct first click leads to task success' hypothesis, we could therefore mine data from millions of task.

To illustrate this, have a look at the results for one task.The overall Task result, you see a score for success and directness, and a breakdown of whether each Success, Fail, or Skip was direct (they went straight to an answer), or indirect (they went back up the tree before they selected an answer):

tree testing results

In the pietree for the same task, you can look in more detail at how many people went the wrong way froma label (each label representing one page of your website):

tree testing results

In the First Click tab, you get a percentage breakdown of which label people clicked first to complete the task:

tree testing results

And in the Paths tab, you can view individual participant paths in detail (including first clicks), and can filter the table by direct and indirect success, fails, and skips (this table is only displaying direct success and direct fail paths):

tree testing results

How to get busy with first click testing

This analysis reinforces something we already knew that firstclicks matterIt is worth your time to get that first impression right.You have plenty of options for measuring the link between first clicks and task success in your scenario-based usability tests. From simply noting where your participants go during observations, to gathering quantitative first click data via online tools, you'll win either way. And if you want to add the latter to your research, Chalkmark can give you first click data on wireframes and landing pages,and Treejack on your information architecture.

To finish, here's a few invaluable insights from other researchers ongetting the most from first click testing:

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How to get started with tree testing 🌱

Are your visitors really getting the most out of your website? Tree testing (or sometimes referred to as reverse card sorting) takes away the guesswork by telling you how easily, or not, people can find information on your website. Discover why Treejack is the tool of choice for website architects.

What’s tree testing and why does it matter? 🌲 👀

Whether you’re building a website from scratch or improving an existing website, tree testing helps you design your website architecture with confidence. How? Tools like Treejack use analysis to help assess how findable your content is for people visiting your website. 

It helps answer burning questions  like:

  • Do my labels make sense?
  • Is my content grouped logically?
  • Can people find what they want easily and quickly?  If not, why not?

Treejack provides invaluable intel for any Information Architect. Why? Knowing where and why people get lost trying to find your content, gives you a much better chance of fixing the actual problem. And the more easily people can find what they’re looking for, the better their experience which is ultimately better for everyone.

How’s tree testing work? 🌲🌳🌿

Tree testing can be broken down into two main parts: 

  • The Tree - Your tree is essentially your site map – a text-only version of your website structure.
  • The Task - Your task is the activity you ask participants to complete by clicking through your tree and choosing the information they think is right. Tools like Treejack analyse the data generated from doing the task to build a picture of how people actually navigated your content in order to try and achieve your task.  It tells you if they got it right or wrong, the path they took and the time it took them.

Whether you’re new to tree testing or already a convert, effective tree testing using Treejack has some key steps.

Step 1.  The ‘ Why’:  Purpose and goals of tree testing

Ask yourself what part of your information architecture needs improvement – is it your whole website or just parts of it? Also think about your audience, they’re the ones you’re trying to improve the website for so the more you know about their needs the better. 

Tip:  Make the most of what tree testing offers to improve your website by building it into your overall design project plan

Step 2.  The ‘How’:   Build your tree

You can build your tree using two main approaches: 

  • Create your tree in spreadsheet and import it into Treejack or
  • Build your tree in Treejack itself, using the labels and structure of your website.

Tip:  Your category labels are known as ‘parent nodes’. Your information labels are known as ‘child nodes’.

Step 3. The ‘What’: Write your tasks

The quality of your tasks will be reflected in the usefulness of your data so it’s worth making sure you create tasks that really test what you want to improve.

Tip:  Use plain language that feels natural and try to write your tasks in a way that reflects the way people who visit your website might actually think when they are trying to find information on your site.

Step 4.  The ‘Who’:  Recruit participants

The quality of your data will largely depend on the quality of your participants. You want people who are as close to your target audience as possible and with the right attitude - willing and committed to being involved.

Tip:  Consider offering some kind of incentive to participants – it shows you value their involvement.

Step 5.  The ‘insights’: Interpret your results

Now for the fun part – making sense of the results. Treejack presents the data from your tree testing as a series of tables and visualizations. You can download them in a spreadsheet in their raw format or customized to your needs.

Tip:  Use the results to gain quick, practical insights you can act on right away or as a starter to dive deeper into the data.

When should I use tree testing? ⌛

Tree testing is useful whenever you want to find out if your website content is labelled and organised in a way that’s easy to understand.  What’s more it can be applied for any website, big (10+ levels with 10000s of labels) or small (3 levels and 22 labels) and any size in between.  Our advice for using Treejack is simply this: test big, test small, test often.

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User research and agile squadification at Trade Me

Hi, I’m Martin. I work as a UX researcher at Trade Me having left Optimal Experience (Optimal Workshop's sister company) last year. For those of you who don’t know, Trade Me is New Zealand’s largest online auction site that also lists real estate to buy and rent, cars to buy, jobs listings, travel accommodation and quite a few other things besides. Over three quarters of the population are members and about three quarters of the Internet traffic for New Zealand sites goes to the sites we run.

Leaving a medium-sized consultancy and joining Trade Me has been a big change in many ways, but in others not so much, as I hadn’t expected to find myself operating in a small team of in-house consultants. The approach the team is taking is proving to be pretty effective, so I thought I’d share some of the details of the way we work with the readers of Optimal Workshop’s blog. Let me explain what I mean…

What agile at Trade Me looks like

Over the last year or so, Trade Me has moved all of its development teams over to Agile following a model pioneered by Spotify. All of the software engineering parts of the business have been ‘squadified’. These people produce the websites & apps or provide and support the infrastructure that makes everything possible.Across Squads, there are common job roles in ‘Chapters’ (like designers or testers) and because people are not easy to force into boxes, and why should they be, there are interest groups called ‘Guilds’.The squads are self-organizing, running their own processes and procedures to get to where they need to. In practice, this means they use as many or as few of the Kanban, Scrum, and Rapid tools they find useful. Over time, we’ve seen that squads tend to follow similar practices as they learn from each other.

How our UX team fits in

Our UX team of three sits outside the squads, but we work with them and with the product owners across the business.How does this work? It might seem counter-intuitive to have UX outside of the tightly-integrated, highly-focused squads, sometimes working with product owners working on stuff that might have little to do with what’s being currently developed in the squads. This comes down to the way Trade Me divides down the UX responsibilities within the organization. Within each squad there is a designer. He or she is responsible for how that feature or app looks, and, more importantly, how it acts — interaction design as well as visual design.Then what do we do, if we are the UX team?

We represent the voice of Trade Me’s users

By conducting research with Trade Me’s users we can validate the squads’ day-to-day decisions, and help frame decisions on future plans. We do this by wearing two hats. Wearing the pointy hats of structured, detailed researchers, we look into long-term trends: the detailed behaviours and goals of our different audiences. We’ve conducted lots of one-on-one interviews with hundreds of people, including top sellers, motor parts buyers, and job seekers, as well as running surveys, focus groups and user testing sessions of future-looking prototypes. For example, we recently spent time with a number of buyers and sellers, seeking to understand their motivations and getting under their skin to find out how they perceive Trade Me.

This kind of research enables Trade Me to anticipate and respond to changes in user perception and satisfaction.Swapping hats to an agile beanie (and stretching the metaphor to breaking point), we react to the medium-term, short-term and very short-term needs of the squads testing their ideas, near-finished work and finished work with users, as well as sometimes simply answering questions and providing opinion, based upon our research. Sometimes this means that we can be testing something in the afternoon having only heard we are needed in the morning. This might sound impossible to accommodate, but the pace of change at Trade Me is such that stuff is getting deployed pretty much every day, many of which affects our users directly. It’s our job to ensure that we support our colleagues to do the very best we can for our users.

How our ‘drop everything’ approach works in practice

Screen Shot 2014-07-11 at 10.00.21 am

We recently conducted five or six rounds (no one can quite remember, we did it so quickly) of testing of our new iPhone application (pictured above) — sometimes testing more than one version at a time. The development team would receive our feedback face-to-face, make changes and we’d be testing the next version of the app the same or the next day. It’s only by doing this that we can ensure that Trade Me members will see positive changes happening daily rather than monthly.

How we prioritize what needs to get done

To help us try to decide what we should be doing at any one time we have some simple rules to prioritise:

  • Core product over other business elements
  • Finish something over start something new
  • Committed work over non-committed work
  • Strategic priorities over non-strategic priorities
  • Responsive support over less time-critical work
  • Where our input is crucial over where our input is a bonus

Applying these rules to any situation makes the decision whether to jump in and help pretty easy.At any one time, each of us in the UX team will have one or more long-term projects, some medium-term projects, and either some short-term projects or the capacity for some short-term projects (usually achieved by putting aside a long-term project for a moment).

We manage our time and projects on Trello, where we can see at a glance what’s happening this and next week, and what we’ve caught sniff of in the wind that might be coming up, or definitely is coming up.On the whole, both we and the squads favour fast response, bulleted list, email ‘reports’ for any short-term requests for user testing.  We get a report out within four hours of testing (usually well within that). After all, the squads are working in short sprints, and our involvement is often at the sharp end where delays are not welcome. Most people aren’t going to read past the management summary anyway, so why not just write that, unless you have to?

How we share our knowledge with the organization

Even though we mainly keep our reporting brief, we want the knowledge we’ve gained from working with each squad or on each product to be available to everyone. So we maintain a wiki that contains summaries of what we did for each piece of work, why we did it and what we found. Detailed reports, if there are any, are attached. We also send all reports out to staff who’ve subscribed to the UX interest email group.

Finally, we send out a monthly email, which looks across a bunch of research we’ve conducted, both short and long-term, and draws conclusions from which our colleagues can learn. All of these latter activities contribute to one of our key objectives: making Trade Me an even more user-centred organization than it is.I’ve been with Trade Me for about six months and we’re constantly refining our UX practices, but so far it seems to be working very well.Right, I’d better go – I’ve just been told I’m user testing something pretty big tomorrow and I need to write a test script!

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