This week we continued working on our prototype on marvel. The prototype would give us a chance to see how the users interacted with the app. They would test this out on the 8th and 9th of December. In the lecture we watched ‘The five act interview’ by Sprint which showed us how to set up the user testing. The five steps are:
- Friendly welcome
- Context questions
- Introduce the prototype
- Tasks
- Quick debrief
From this we learnt that we cannot just simply ask them to test out the prototype immediately. Instead, we should ask questions in context such as; have they used any apps related to planning? How they felt about them? Although we already asked these questions at the User Interview at the beginning of the module.
Reinforced throughout the interview was to reassure the user. The user should not feel, as though they are at an interview as, this would lead them to believe there is a right answer. We want the user to think aloud to give us a better understanding of how usable the app is.
We realised that without a dragging feature on marvel the prototype would not help us assess how viable the app would be, how the client would interact with the app without us present. We decided the users would test it out on keynotes with the marvel prototype as a supporting model to show what we envision the app to look like.
During the seminar, we assigned roles during the user interviews. We would have three observers and two speakers. We will be showing the prototype to five people, which means 80% of any faults of our app, would be flagged up. Any other details would be minor details that would not affect the function of the app. Hopefully we would be able to get valuable information from the user testing.
Hi team, thanks for this… Great to hear you have thought about the content of the five act interview that we discussed in class. In your final design log, I hope to hear more about your planning. For example this post could have mentioned more about who’ll partake in your user test and what in response you’ll need to create the right testing environment. This post also seems to highlight some limitations of the Marvel app but I am not sure I have completely followed how you used Keynote and Marvel in combination. This could be explained a bit further.
There is a few mis-understandings here regarding interviews: Interviews are also not there to make participants feel there is a ‘right answer’. At this point, you’ve not yet had research methods. More generally the point regarding most participant involvement is to give them the opportunity to express their views. Interviews, thus, should also avoid any ‘leading’ questions that might suggest there is a single right answer. More on the comparison can be found here: Hertzum, M. (2016). A usability test is not an interview. Interactions, 23(2), 82–84. http://doi.org/10.1145/2875462
This comment reflects my personal views and does not represent those of our team’s.
Personally, I tend to avoid the phrase “user test” whenever I can especially when we speak to the users. For me this phrase does sound a lot like testing the users rather than whatever the solution is for any of the teams. “Interview” sounds more like a neutral ground and there could be more than one kind of interviews so if it’s clear enough which interview the literature is referring to, I think “interview” is a more appropriate term to use. This is solely from the perspective of what the users would think when they hear the phrase rather than from our point of view who oversees the whole project. The users do not know of the stages we as the developers have to go through behind the scene and the chance is they don’t care about the jargons.
But please do enlighten us with your ideas and experiences with the two terms.
Hi Toby, it’s a good discussion point and you pick up on a very good observation — there’s different kinds of languages and reference points for developers and for participants; there’s also lots of different kind of terminology and it may be confusion what term describes which activity. ‘User test’ is certainly more of a term the developer knows about and it’s not one that sounds too exciting or even understandable to users — so you have a good point to reach out to participants differently. Case in point, the term ‘user test’ raised some misconceptions when I emailed users. The design sprint methodology uses the term ‘the five-step interview’ instead of referring to user tests. You could refer to this instead (and reference it) to bound it from other forms of interviews making clear that the objective of the interaction was on verifying aspects of a design. I think that’s what Hertzum meant to discuss in his article when comparing ‘usability test’ and ‘interview’. Hope this helps. Thanks for bringing this up.