Unmoderated usability testing: a checklist

In-person moderated user testing is a valuable part of any research project. Meaning you can see first-hand how your users interact with your prototypes and products. But in-person isn’t always a viable option. What to do if your project needs user testing but it’s just not possible to get in front of your users personally? 

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Let’s talk unmoderated user testing. This approach sidesteps the need to meet your participants face-to-face as it’s done entirely remotely, over the internet. By it’s very nature there are also considerable benefits to unmoderated user testing.

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What is unmoderated user testing? 💻👀

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In the most basic sense, unmoderated user testing removes the ‘moderated’ part of the equation. Instead of having a facilitator guide participants through the test, participants complete the testing activity by themselves and in their own time. For the most part, everything else stays the same.

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The key differences are:

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• You can’t ask follow-up questions
• You can’t use low-fidelity prototypes
• You can’t support participants (beyond the initial instructions you send them).

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Is unmoderated user testing right for your research project?

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By nature, unmoderated user research does not include any direct interaction between the researcher and the study participants. This is really the biggest benefit and also the biggest drawback. 

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Benefits of unmoderated usability testing 👩🏻💻

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• Speed and turnaround  - As there is no need to schedule meetings with each participant, unmoderated testing is usually much faster to initiate and complete. Depending on the study, it may be possible to launch a study and receive results in just a few hours.

• Size of study (participant numbers) - Unmoderated user testing also allows you to collect feedback from dozens or even hundreds of users at the same time.

• Location (local and/or international) -Testing online removes reliance on participants being physically present for the testing which broadens the ability to make contact with participants within your country or across the globe. 

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If you’d like to know more about the benefits of unmoderated usability testing, take a look at our article five reasons you should consider unmoderated user testing.

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Limitations of unmoderated usability testing 🚧

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• Early-prototype testing is difficult without a moderator to explain and help participants recover from errors or limitations of the prototype.

• Participant behavior - Without a moderator, participants tend to be less engaged and behave less realistically in tasks that depend on imagination, decision-making, or emotional responses.

• Inability to ask follow-up questions - by not being in the testing with the participant, the facilitator can’t ask further questions to get a deeper understanding of the participant’s reasoning. As you can’t rely on human judgment through a moderator being in the room with the participants and the ability to adjust the test in the moment, unmoderated usability testing needs thorough up front planning.

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Because of these limitations unmoderated usability testing usually works best for evaluating live websites and apps or highly functional prototypes.  It’s great for testing activities that don’t require a lot of imagination or emotion from participants. Such as testing functionality or answering direct queries to do with your product.

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What’s involved when setting up unmoderated usability testing? 🤔💭

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1. Define testing goals

With any usability testing, it pays to define your goals before getting underway with setting up the software. What do you want to know from the participants? Goals vary from test to test. Understanding your goals upfront will help you to make the correct tool choice.

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2. Define your demographic

With a clear understanding of your goal, now it’s time to consider which participants are right for your study. Think about who they are, their demographic, and where they live. Are they new users or existing? Are they experts or novices?

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3. Selecting testing software

As unmoderated studies, are done remotely, the software used to faciliate the study plays a key role in ensuring you get useful results. Without a facilitator, the software must guide the participants through the session and record what happens. Take the time to test software and select one that is right for your study.

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4. Write your own tasks and questions

Think through your goals and what you want to achieve from the testing. Many of the unmoderated testing services include study templates with generic example tasks. Remember they are templates, and your tasks and questions should be specific to your particular study. Any task instructions guiding the participants should be clear and directive.

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5. Trial session

You’ve done all of the upfront work, now it’s time to test that it works, the software does what you expect and the instructions you have written can be followed. Doing a test run is crucial, especially with unmoderated usability testing, as there won’t be a facilitator in the testing to fix any problems.

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6. Recruit participants

Having defined your target audience and demographic, now is the time to recruit participants. Ensuring you have some control over the recruitment process is important, either through screening questions or recruiting your own. There are services that  recruit from a pool of willing participants. Thiscan be a great way to get a wide range of users.

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7. Analyze results

You are likely to accumulate a lot of data from your unmoderated testing. You’ll need a way to organize and analyze the data to derive insights that are valuable. Depending on the type of usability testing you do will vary the type of results. Quantitative testing gives data-driven results and direct answers. Whereas qualitative testing through audio or video recordings of participants’ actions or comments will need time to analyze and look at behavioral observations. 

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Wrap Up 🌯

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Unmoderated usability testing can be a good option for your study. It may not be right for all of your studies all of the time. While it can be quick to implement and often cheaper than moderated usability testing, it still requires time and planning to ensure you get the data insights you are looking for. Following a checklist can be a great way to ensure you approach your research methodically.

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A great user experience (UX) is one of the largest drivers of growth and revenue through user satisfaction. However, when budgets get tight, or there is a squeeze on timelines, user research is one of the first things to go. Often at the cost of user satisfaction.  

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This short sighted view can mean project managers are preoccupied with achieving milestones and short term goals. And UX teams get stuck researching products they weren’t actually involved with developing. As a result no one has the space and understanding to really develop a product that speaks to users needs, desires and wants. There must  be a better way to produce a product that is user-driven.  Thankfully there is.

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What is user research and why should project managers care about it? 👨🏻💻

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User research is an important part of the product development process. Primarily, user research involves using different research methods to gather information about your end users. 

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Essentially it aims to create the best possible experience for your users by listening and learning directly from those that already or potentially will use your product. You might conduct interviews to help you understand a particular problem, carry out a tree test to identify bottlenecks or problems in your navigation, or do some usability testing to directly observe your users as they perform different tasks on your website or in your app. Or a combination of these to understand what users really want.

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To a project manager and team, this likely sounds fairly familiar, that any project can’t be managed in a silo. Regular check-ins and feedback are essential to making smart decisions. The same with UX research. It can make the whole process quicker and more efficient. By taking a step back, digging into your users’ minds, and gaining a fuller understanding of what they want upfront, it can curtail short-term views and decisions.

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Bringing more user research into your development process has major benefits for the team, and the ultimately the quality of that final product. There are three key benefits:

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1. Saves your development team time and effort. Ensuring the team is working on what users want, not wasting time on features that don’t measure up.
2. Gives your users a better experience by meeting their requirements.
3. Helps your team innovate quickly by understanding what users really want.

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As a project manager, making space and planning for user research can be one of the best ways to ensure the team is creating a product that truly is user-driven.

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How to bring research into your product development process 🤔

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There are a couple of ways you can bring UX research into your product development process. 

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1. Start with a dedicated research project.
2. Integrate UX research throughout the development project.

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It can be more difficult to integrate UX research throughout the process, as it means planning the project with various stages of research built in to check the development of features. But ultimately this approach is likely to turn out the best product. One that has been considered, checked and well thought out through the whole product development process. To help you on the way we have laid out 6 key steps to help you integrate UX research into your product development process.

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6 key steps to integrate UX research 👟

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Step 1: Define your research questions

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Take a step back, look at your product and define your research questions. 

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It may be tempting just to ask, ‘do users like our latest release?’ This however does not get to why or what your users like or don’t like. Try instead:

• What do our users really want from our product?
• Where are they currently struggling while using our website?
• How can we design a better product for our users?

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These questions help to form the basis of specific questions about your product and specific areas of research to explore which in turn help shape the type of research you undertake.

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Step 2: Create your research plan

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With a few key research questions to focus on, it’s time to create your research plan.

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A great research plan covers your project’s goals, scope, timing, and deliverables. It’s essential for keeping yourself organized but also for getting key stakeholder signoff.

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Step 3: Prepare any research logistics

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Every project plan requires attention to detail including a user research project. And with any good project there are a set of steps to help make sense of it.

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1. Method: Based on your questions, what is the best user research method to use? 
2. Schedule: When will the research take place? How long will it go on for? If this is ongoing research, plan how it will be implemented and how often.
3. Location: Where will the research take place? 
4. Resources: What resources do you need? This could be technical support or team members.
5. Participants: Define who you want to research. Who is eligible to take part in this research? How will you find the right people?
6. Data: How will you capture the research data? Where will it be stored? How will you analyze the data and create insights and reports that can be used?
7. Deliverables: What is the ultimate goal for your research project?

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Step 4: Decide which method will be used

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Many user research methods benefit from an observational style of testing. Particularly if you are looking into why users undertake a specific task or struggle.

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Typically, there are two approaches to testing:

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1. Moderated testing is when a moderator is present during the test to answer questions, guide the participant, or dig deeper with further questions.
2. Unmoderated testing is when a participant is left on their own to carry out the task. Often this is done remotely and with very specific instructions.Your key questions will determine which method will works best for your research.  Find our more about the differences.

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Step 5: Run your research session

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It’s time to gather insights and data. The questions you are asking will influence how you run your research sessions and the methods you’ve chosen. 

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If you are running surveys you will be asking users through a banner or invitation to fill out your survey. Unmoderated and very specific questions. Gathering qualitative data and analyzing patterns.

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If you’re using something qualitative like interviews or heat mapping, you’ll want to implement software and gather as much information as possible.

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Step 6: Prepare a research findings report and share with stakeholders

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Analyze your findings, interrogate your data and find those insights that dive into the way your users think. How do they love your product? But how do they also struggle?

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Pull together your findings and insights into an easy to understand report. And get socializing. Bring your key stakeholders together and share your findings. Bringing everyone across the findings together can bring everyone on the journey. And for the development process can mean decisions can be user-driven. 

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Wrap Up 🥙

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Part of any project, UX research should be essential to developing a product that is user-driven. Integrating user research into your development process can be challenging. But with planning and strategy it can be hugely beneficial to saving time and money in the long run. 

Ever wondered what the relationship is between information architecture (IA) and UX? Simply put, IA is the foundation of UX. We outline why.

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What is Information Architecture? 🛠️

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According to Abby Covert, a leader in the field of information architecture, IA is ‘the way we arrange the parts to make sense of the whole.’ This can relate to a website, a retail store or an app. And you could even consider the way a library is sorted to be information architecture. For the purposes of this article, we will focus on digital products (apps or websites).

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Well-organized information architecture is fundamentally important to the success of your product. As a designer, knowing the content you are delivering and how, is fundamental to creating a UX that performs. Working with the needs of the organization and meeting the requirements of the users in a meaningful and delightful way. Organizing and structuring the information so that navigating, searching, and understanding your product is seamless is ultimately what UX design is all about. Arranging the parts to make sense of the whole, you could say.

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While design is about creating visual pointers for users to find their way, information architecture can be broken down into 3 main areas to consider when building a great user experience:

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• Navigation: How people make their way through information 
• Labels: How information is named and represented.
• Search: How people will look for information (keywords, categories)

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When put like this it does seem pretty straightforward. Maybe even simple? But these tasks need to be straightforward for your users. Putting thought, time, and research at the front of your design and build can increase your chances of delivering an intuitive product. In fact, at any point in your product’s life cycle, it’s worth testing and reviewing these 3 areas.  

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Key things to consider to build an effective IA for UX 🏗

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Developing a well-thought-out and researched information architecture for your product could be considered a foundation step to creating a great UX product. To help you on your way, here are 6 key things to consider when building effective information architecture for a great user experience. 

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1. Define the goals of your organization: Before starting your IA plan, uncover what is the purpose of your product and how this will align with the goals of your stakeholders.
2. Figure out your user’s goals: Who do you want to use your product? Create scenarios, discuss with probable users and find out what they’ll use your product for and how they’ll use it.  
3. Study your competitors: Take note of websites, apps and other digital products that are similar to yours and look at their information architecture from a UX point of view. How does the design work with the IA. Is it simple to navigate? Easy to find what to do next?  Look at how key information is designed and displayed.
4. Draw a site map: Once the IA is planned and developed and the content is ready, it’s time to figure out how users are going to access all of your information. Spend time planning navigation that is not too complex that will help users to browse your product easily. 
5. Cross browser testing: Your information architecture behavior may vary from one browser so it’s worth doing some cross-browser compatibility testing. It would be very disappointing to work so hard to get the best UX with your product, only to be let down because of browser variances.
6. Usability testing: End users are the perfect people to let you know how your product is performing. Set up a testing/staging environment and test on external users. Observing your participants while they move their way through your product uninterrupted and listening to their opinions can shed light on the successes (and failures) in a very insightful way. 

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Wrap Up 🌯

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Information architecture is the foundation of designing a great product that meets (or even exceeds) your users’ needs, wants, and desires. By balancing an organization’s needs with insight into what users actually want, you’re well equipped to design an information architecture  that helps build a product that delivers a positive user experience. Research, test, research, and test again should be the mantra throughout the development, design, and implementation of your product and beyond.