April 14, 2016
6 min

Using paper prototypes in UX

In UX research we are told again and again that to ensure truly user-centered design, it’s important to test ideas with real users as early as possible. There are many benefits that come from introducing the voice of the people you are designing for in the early stages of the design process. The more feedback you have to work with, the more you can inform your design to align with real needs and expectations. In turn, this leads to better experiences that are more likely to succeed in the real world.It is not surprising then that paper prototypes have become a popular tool used among researchers. They allow ideas to be tested as they emerge, and can inform initial designs before putting in the hard yards of building the real thing. It would seem that they’re almost a no-brainer for researchers, but just like anything out there, along with all the praise, they have also received a fair share of criticism, so let’s explore paper prototypes a little further.

What’s a paper prototype anyway? 🧐📖

Paper prototyping is a simple usability testing technique designed to test interfaces quickly and cheaply. A paper prototype is nothing more than a visual representation of what an interface could look like on a piece of paper (or even a whiteboard or chalkboard). Unlike high-fidelity prototypes that allow for digital interactions to take place, paper prototypes are considered to be low-fidelity, in that they don’t allow direct user interaction. They can also range in sophistication, from a simple sketch using a pen and paper to simulate an interface, through to using designing or publishing software to create a more polished experience with additional visual elements.

Screen Shot 2016-04-15 at 9.26.30 AM
Different ways of designing paper prototypes, using OptimalSort as an example

Showing a research participant a paper prototype is far from the real deal, but it can provide useful insights into how users may expect to interact with specific features and what makes sense to them from a basic, user-centered perspective. There are some mixed attitudes towards paper prototypes among the UX community, so before we make any distinct judgements, let's weigh up their pros and cons.

Advantages 🏆

  • They’re cheap and fastPen and paper, a basic word document, Photoshop. With a paper prototype, you can take an idea and transform it into a low-fidelity (but workable) testing solution very quickly, without having to write code or use sophisticated tools. This is especially beneficial to researchers who work with tight budgets, and don’t have the time or resources to design an elaborate user testing plan.
  • Anyone can do itPaper prototypes allow you to test designs without having to involve multiple roles in building them. Developers can take a back seat as you test initial ideas, before any code work begins.
  • They encourage creativityFrom both the product teams participating in their design, but also from the users. They require the user to employ their imagination, and give them the opportunity express their thoughts and ideas on what improvements can be made. Because they look unfinished, they naturally invite constructive criticism and feedback.
  • They help minimize your chances of failurePaper prototypes and user-centered design go hand in hand. Introducing real people into your design as early as possible can help verify whether you are on the right track, and generate feedback that may give you a good idea of whether your idea is likely to succeed or not.

Disadvantages 😬

  • They’re not as polished as interactive prototypesIf executed poorly, paper prototypes can appear unprofessional and haphazard. They lack the richness of an interactive experience, and if our users are not well informed when coming in for a testing session, they may be surprised to be testing digital experiences on pieces of paper.
  • The interaction is limitedDigital experiences can contain animations and interactions that can’t be replicated on paper. It can be difficult for a user to fully understand an interface when these elements are absent, and of course, the closer the interaction mimics the final product, the more reliable our findings will be.
  • They require facilitationWith an interactive prototype you can assign your user tasks to complete and observe how they interact with the interface. Paper prototypes, however, require continuous guidance from a moderator in communicating next steps and ensuring participants understand the task at hand.
  • Their results have to be interpreted carefullyPaper prototypes can’t emulate the final experience entirely. It is important to interpret their findings while keeping their limitations in mind. Although they can help minimize your chances of failure, they can’t guarantee that your final product will be a success. There are factors that determine success that cannot be captured on a piece of paper, and positive feedback at the prototyping stage does not necessarily equate to a well-received product further down the track.

Improving the interface of card sorting, one prototype at a time 💡

We recently embarked on a research project looking at the user interface of our card-sorting tool, OptimalSort. Our research has two main objectives — first of all to benchmark the current experience on laptops and tablets and identify ways in which we can improve the current interface. The second objective is to look at how we can improve the experience of card sorting on a mobile phone.

Rather than replicating the desktop experience on a smaller screen, we want to create an intuitive experience for mobiles, ensuring we maintain the quality of data collected across devices.Our current mobile experience is a scaled down version of the desktop and still has room for improvement, but despite that, 9 per cent of our users utilize the app. We decided to start from the ground up and test an entirely new design using paper prototypes. In the spirit of testing early and often, we decided to jump right into testing sessions with real users. In our first testing sprint, we asked participants to take part in two tasks. The first was to perform an open or closed card sort on a laptop or tablet. The second task involved using paper prototypes to see how people would respond to the same experience on a mobile phone.

blog_artwork_01-03

Context is everything 🎯

What did we find? In the context of our research project, paper prototypes worked remarkably well. We were somewhat apprehensive at first, trying to figure out the exact flow of the experience and whether the people coming into our office would get it. As it turns out, people are clever, and even those with limited experience using a smartphone were able to navigate and identify areas for improvement just as easily as anyone else. Some participants even said they prefered the experience of testing paper prototypes over a laptop. In an effort to make our prototype-based tasks easy to understand and easy to explain to our participants, we reduced the full card sort to a few key interactions, minimizing the number of branches in the UI flow.

This could explain a preference for the mobile task, where we only asked participants to sort through a handful of cards, as opposed to a whole set.The main thing we found was that no matter how well you plan your test, paper prototypes require you to be flexible in adapting the flow of your session to however your user responds. We accepted that deviating from our original plan was something we had to embrace, and in the end these additional conversations with our participants helped us generate insights above and beyond the basics we aimed to address. We now have a whole range of feedback that we can utilize in making more sophisticated, interactive prototypes.

Whether our success with using paper prototypes was determined by the specific setup of our testing sessions, or simply by their pure usefulness as a research technique is hard to tell. By first performing a card sorting task on a laptop or tablet, our participants approached the paper prototype with an understanding of what exactly a card sort required. Therefore there is no guarantee that we would have achieved the same level of success in testing paper prototypes on their own. What this does demonstrate, however, is that paper prototyping is heavily dependent on the context of your assessment.

Final thoughts 💬

Paper prototypes are not guaranteed to work for everybody. If you’re designing an entirely new experience and trying to describe something complex in an abstracted form on paper, people may struggle to comprehend your idea. Even a careful explanation doesn’t guarantee that it will be fully understood by the user. Should this stop you from testing out the usefulness of paper prototypes in the context of your project? Absolutely not.

In a perfect world we’d test high fidelity interactive prototypes that resemble the real deal as closely as possible, every step of the way. However, if we look at testing from a practical perspective, before we can fully test sophisticated designs, paper prototypes provide a great solution for generating initial feedback.In his article criticizing the use of paper prototypes, Jake Knapp makes the point that when we show customers a paper prototype we’re inviting feedback, not reactions. What we found in our research however, was quite the opposite.

In our sessions, participants voiced their expectations and understanding of what actions were possible at each stage, without us having to probe specifically for feedback. Sure we also received general comments on icon or colour preferences, but for the most part our users gave us insights into what they felt throughout the experience, in addition to what they thought.

Further reading 🧠

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1 min read

Using paper prototypes in UX

In UX research we are told again and again that to ensure truly user-centered design, it’s important to test ideas with real users as early as possible. There are many benefits that come from introducing the voice of the people you are designing for in the early stages of the design process. The more feedback you have to work with, the more you can inform your design to align with real needs and expectations. In turn, this leads to better experiences that are more likely to succeed in the real world.It is not surprising then that paper prototypes have become a popular tool used among researchers. They allow ideas to be tested as they emerge, and can inform initial designs before putting in the hard yards of building the real thing. It would seem that they’re almost a no-brainer for researchers, but just like anything out there, along with all the praise, they have also received a fair share of criticism, so let’s explore paper prototypes a little further.

What’s a paper prototype anyway? 🧐📖

Paper prototyping is a simple usability testing technique designed to test interfaces quickly and cheaply. A paper prototype is nothing more than a visual representation of what an interface could look like on a piece of paper (or even a whiteboard or chalkboard). Unlike high-fidelity prototypes that allow for digital interactions to take place, paper prototypes are considered to be low-fidelity, in that they don’t allow direct user interaction. They can also range in sophistication, from a simple sketch using a pen and paper to simulate an interface, through to using designing or publishing software to create a more polished experience with additional visual elements.

Screen Shot 2016-04-15 at 9.26.30 AM
Different ways of designing paper prototypes, using OptimalSort as an example

Showing a research participant a paper prototype is far from the real deal, but it can provide useful insights into how users may expect to interact with specific features and what makes sense to them from a basic, user-centered perspective. There are some mixed attitudes towards paper prototypes among the UX community, so before we make any distinct judgements, let's weigh up their pros and cons.

Advantages 🏆

  • They’re cheap and fastPen and paper, a basic word document, Photoshop. With a paper prototype, you can take an idea and transform it into a low-fidelity (but workable) testing solution very quickly, without having to write code or use sophisticated tools. This is especially beneficial to researchers who work with tight budgets, and don’t have the time or resources to design an elaborate user testing plan.
  • Anyone can do itPaper prototypes allow you to test designs without having to involve multiple roles in building them. Developers can take a back seat as you test initial ideas, before any code work begins.
  • They encourage creativityFrom both the product teams participating in their design, but also from the users. They require the user to employ their imagination, and give them the opportunity express their thoughts and ideas on what improvements can be made. Because they look unfinished, they naturally invite constructive criticism and feedback.
  • They help minimize your chances of failurePaper prototypes and user-centered design go hand in hand. Introducing real people into your design as early as possible can help verify whether you are on the right track, and generate feedback that may give you a good idea of whether your idea is likely to succeed or not.

Disadvantages 😬

  • They’re not as polished as interactive prototypesIf executed poorly, paper prototypes can appear unprofessional and haphazard. They lack the richness of an interactive experience, and if our users are not well informed when coming in for a testing session, they may be surprised to be testing digital experiences on pieces of paper.
  • The interaction is limitedDigital experiences can contain animations and interactions that can’t be replicated on paper. It can be difficult for a user to fully understand an interface when these elements are absent, and of course, the closer the interaction mimics the final product, the more reliable our findings will be.
  • They require facilitationWith an interactive prototype you can assign your user tasks to complete and observe how they interact with the interface. Paper prototypes, however, require continuous guidance from a moderator in communicating next steps and ensuring participants understand the task at hand.
  • Their results have to be interpreted carefullyPaper prototypes can’t emulate the final experience entirely. It is important to interpret their findings while keeping their limitations in mind. Although they can help minimize your chances of failure, they can’t guarantee that your final product will be a success. There are factors that determine success that cannot be captured on a piece of paper, and positive feedback at the prototyping stage does not necessarily equate to a well-received product further down the track.

Improving the interface of card sorting, one prototype at a time 💡

We recently embarked on a research project looking at the user interface of our card-sorting tool, OptimalSort. Our research has two main objectives — first of all to benchmark the current experience on laptops and tablets and identify ways in which we can improve the current interface. The second objective is to look at how we can improve the experience of card sorting on a mobile phone.

Rather than replicating the desktop experience on a smaller screen, we want to create an intuitive experience for mobiles, ensuring we maintain the quality of data collected across devices.Our current mobile experience is a scaled down version of the desktop and still has room for improvement, but despite that, 9 per cent of our users utilize the app. We decided to start from the ground up and test an entirely new design using paper prototypes. In the spirit of testing early and often, we decided to jump right into testing sessions with real users. In our first testing sprint, we asked participants to take part in two tasks. The first was to perform an open or closed card sort on a laptop or tablet. The second task involved using paper prototypes to see how people would respond to the same experience on a mobile phone.

blog_artwork_01-03

Context is everything 🎯

What did we find? In the context of our research project, paper prototypes worked remarkably well. We were somewhat apprehensive at first, trying to figure out the exact flow of the experience and whether the people coming into our office would get it. As it turns out, people are clever, and even those with limited experience using a smartphone were able to navigate and identify areas for improvement just as easily as anyone else. Some participants even said they prefered the experience of testing paper prototypes over a laptop. In an effort to make our prototype-based tasks easy to understand and easy to explain to our participants, we reduced the full card sort to a few key interactions, minimizing the number of branches in the UI flow.

This could explain a preference for the mobile task, where we only asked participants to sort through a handful of cards, as opposed to a whole set.The main thing we found was that no matter how well you plan your test, paper prototypes require you to be flexible in adapting the flow of your session to however your user responds. We accepted that deviating from our original plan was something we had to embrace, and in the end these additional conversations with our participants helped us generate insights above and beyond the basics we aimed to address. We now have a whole range of feedback that we can utilize in making more sophisticated, interactive prototypes.

Whether our success with using paper prototypes was determined by the specific setup of our testing sessions, or simply by their pure usefulness as a research technique is hard to tell. By first performing a card sorting task on a laptop or tablet, our participants approached the paper prototype with an understanding of what exactly a card sort required. Therefore there is no guarantee that we would have achieved the same level of success in testing paper prototypes on their own. What this does demonstrate, however, is that paper prototyping is heavily dependent on the context of your assessment.

Final thoughts 💬

Paper prototypes are not guaranteed to work for everybody. If you’re designing an entirely new experience and trying to describe something complex in an abstracted form on paper, people may struggle to comprehend your idea. Even a careful explanation doesn’t guarantee that it will be fully understood by the user. Should this stop you from testing out the usefulness of paper prototypes in the context of your project? Absolutely not.

In a perfect world we’d test high fidelity interactive prototypes that resemble the real deal as closely as possible, every step of the way. However, if we look at testing from a practical perspective, before we can fully test sophisticated designs, paper prototypes provide a great solution for generating initial feedback.In his article criticizing the use of paper prototypes, Jake Knapp makes the point that when we show customers a paper prototype we’re inviting feedback, not reactions. What we found in our research however, was quite the opposite.

In our sessions, participants voiced their expectations and understanding of what actions were possible at each stage, without us having to probe specifically for feedback. Sure we also received general comments on icon or colour preferences, but for the most part our users gave us insights into what they felt throughout the experience, in addition to what they thought.

Further reading 🧠

Learn more
1 min read

How to create a UX research plan

Summary: A detailed UX research plan helps you keep your overarching research goals in mind as you work through the logistics of a research project.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of sitting down to interview one of your users, steering the conversation in interesting directions and taking note of valuable comments and insights. But, as every researcher knows, it’s also easy to get carried away. Sometimes, the very process of user research can be so engrossing that you forget the reason you’re there in the first place, or unexpected things that come up that can force you to change course or focus.

This is where a UX research plan comes into play. Taking the time to set up a detailed overview of your high-level research goals, team, budget and timeframe will give your research the best chance of succeeding. It's also a good tool for fostering alignment - it can make sure everyone working on the project is clear on the objectives and timeframes. Over the course of your project, you can refer back to your plan – a single source of truth. After all, as Benjamin Franklin famously said: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at the best way to put together a research plan.

Your research recipe for success

Any project needs a plan to be successful, and user research is no different. As we pointed out above, a solid plan will help to keep you focused and on track during your research – something that can understandably become quite tricky as you dive further down the research rabbit hole, pursuing interesting conversations during user interviews and running usability tests. Thought of another way, it’s really about accountability. Even if your initial goal is something quite broad like “find out what’s wrong with our website”, it’s important to have a plan that will help you to identify when you’ve actually discovered what’s wrong.

So what does a UX research plan look like? It’s basically a document that outlines the where, why, who, how and what of your research project.

It’s time to create your research plan! Here’s everything you need to consider when putting this plan together.

Make a list of your stakeholders

The first thing you need to do is work out who the stakeholders are on your project. These are the people who have a stake in your research and stand to benefit from the results. In those instances where you’ve been directed to carry out a piece of research you’ll likely know who these people are, but sometimes it can be a little tricky. Stakeholders could be C-level executives, your customer support team, sales people or product teams. If you’re working in an agency or you’re freelancing, these could be your clients.

Make a list of everyone you think needs to be consulted and then start setting up catch-up sessions to get their input. Having a list of stakeholders also makes it easy to deliver insights back to these people at the end of your research project, as well as identify any possible avenues for further research. This also helps you identify who to involve in your research (not just report findings back to).

Action: Make a list of all of your stakeholders.

Write your research questions

Before we get into timeframes and budgets you first need to determine your research questions, also known as your research objectives. These are the ‘why’ of your research. Why are you carrying out this research? What do you hope to achieve by doing all of this work? Your objectives should be informed by discussions with your stakeholders, as well as any other previous learnings you can uncover. Think of past customer support discussions and sales conversations with potential customers.

Here are a few examples of basic research questions to get you thinking. These questions should be actionable and specific, like the examples we’ve listed here:

  • “How do people currently use the wishlist feature on our website?”
  • “How do our current customers go about tracking their orders?”
  • “How do people make a decision on which power company to use?”
  • “What actions do our customers take when they’re thinking about buying a new TV?”

A good research question should be actionable in the sense that you can identify a clear way to attempt to answer it, and specific in that you’ll know when you’ve found the answer you’re looking for. It's also important to keep in mind that your research questions are not the questions you ask during your research sessions - they should be broad enough that they allow you to formulate a list of tasks or questions to help understand the problem space.

Action: Create a list of possible research questions, then prioritize them after speaking with stakeholders.

What is your budget?

Your budget will play a role in how you conduct your research, and possibly the amount of data you're able to gather.

Having a large budget will give you flexibility. You’ll be able to attract large numbers of participants, either by running paid recruitment campaigns on social media or using a dedicated participant recruitment service. A larger budget helps you target more people, but also target more specific people through dedicated participant services as well as recruitment agencies.

Note that more money doesn't always equal better access to tools - e.g. if I work for a company that is super strict on security, I might not be able to use any tools at all. But it does make it easier to choose appropriate methods and that allow you to deliver quality insights. E.g. a big budget might allow you to travel, or do more in-person research which is otherwise quite expensive.

With a small budget, you’ll have to think carefully about how you’ll reward participants, as well as the number of participants you can test. You may also find that your budget limits the tools you can use for your testing. That said, you shouldn’t let your budget dictate your research. You just have to get creative!

Action: Work out what the budget is for your research project. It’s also good to map out several cheaper alternatives that you can pursue if required.

How long will your project take?

How long do you think your user research project will take? This is a necessary consideration, especially if you’ve got people who are expecting to see the results of your research. For example, your organization’s marketing team may be waiting for some of your exploratory research in order to build customer personas. Or, a product team may be waiting to see the results of your first-click test before developing a new signup page on your website.

It’s true that qualitative research often doesn’t have a clear end in the way that quantitative research does, for example as you identify new things to test and research. In this case, you may want to break up your research into different sub-projects and attach deadlines to each of them.

Action: Figure out how long your research project is likely to take. If you’re mixing qualitative and quantitative research, split your project timeframe into sub-projects to make assigning deadlines easier.

Understanding participant recruitment

Who you recruit for your research comes from your research questions. Who can best give you the answers you need? While you can often find participants by working with your customer support, sales and marketing teams, certain research questions may require you to look further afield.

The methods you use to carry out your research will also have a part to play in your participants, specifically in terms of the numbers required. For qualitative research methods like interviews and usability tests, you may find you’re able to gather enough useful data after speaking with 5 people. For quantitative methods like card sorts and tree tests, it’s best to have at least 30 participants. You can read more about participant numbers in this Nielsen Norman article.

At this stage of the research plan process, you’ll also want to write some screening questions. These are what you’ll use to identify potential participants by asking about their characteristics and experience.

Action: Define the participants you’ll need to include in your research project, and where you plan to source them. This may require going outside of your existing user base.

Which research methods will you use?

The research methods you use should be informed by your research questions. Some questions are best answered by quantitative research methods like surveys or A/B tests, with others by qualitative methods like contextual inquiries, user interviews and usability tests. You’ll also find that some questions are best answered by multiple methods, in what’s known as mixed methods research.

If you’re not sure which method to use, carefully consider your question. If we go back to one of our earlier research question examples: “How do our current customers go about tracking their orders?”, we’d want to test the navigation pathways.

If you’re not sure which method to use, it helps to carefully consider your research question. Let’s use one of our earlier examples: “Is it easy for users to check their order history in our iPhone app?” as en example. In this case, because we want to see how users move through our app, we need a method that’s suited to testing navigation pathways – like tree testing.

For the question: “What actions do our customers take when they’re thinking about buying a new TV?”, we’d want to take a different approach. Because this is more of an exploratory question, we’re probably best to carry out a round of user interviews and ask questions about their process for buying a TV.

Action: Before diving in and setting up a card sort, consider which method is best suited to answer your research question.

Develop your research protocol

A protocol is essentially a script for your user research. For the most part, it’s a list of the tasks and questions you want to cover in your in-person sessions. But, it doesn’t apply to all research types. For example, for a tree test, you might write your tasks, but this isn't really a script or protocol.

Writing your protocol should start with actually thinking about what these questions will be and getting feedback on them, as well as:

  • The tasks you want your participants to do (usability testing)
  • How much time you’ve set aside for the session
  • A script or description that you can use for every session
  • Your process for recording the interviews, including how you’ll look after participant data.

Action: This is essentially a research plan within a research plan – it’s what you’d take to every session.

Happy researching!

Related UX plan reading

Learn more
1 min read

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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