Planning for Better Research and Usability Outcomes

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User interviews can produce a wealth of information about user needs, motivations, pain points, constraints, beliefs and values. But did you know that, through good planning, they can also make task identification and usability outcomes a lot more impactful? 

Let’s take a look at how thinking about tasks early sets the foundation for meaningful interviews, testing, and measurable improvements.

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Research planning

Many key decisions will be made in the planning phase of any project. During planning for research studies, alongside stakeholders and team members, it’s important to establish: 

• What is our problem space?
• What KPI’s are we looking to change or improve? 
• What are the desired outcomes?
• What would success look like for the business and the customer?
• What are the questions we need to answer?
• What information types will we need to answer those questions and make decisions?

Depending on how much you already know about the problem space, some of the above questions may be able to be answered now or may be dependent on further research. 

If the answers to these questions indicate a functional change in a system i.e. we’ve already identified that there’s a problem with the current solution, or the premise of the project is to create something new that a person is going to interact with, then we also need to think about: 

• What tasks need to be completed? 

Identifying tasks at this stage makes it easier to know what tasks need to be completed without determining how. 

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Interviews

In the case that we’ve identified tasks that need to be completed, we now have an opportunity to learn more about how people currently do things in our interviews. 

When crafting a research study or discussion guide, we can intentionally probe further or observe behaviours that show opportunities for understanding and improvement. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples: 

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‍Discovery

In Discovery, we might be unclear about what issues exist (if they exist at all), how people currently complete tasks, any current pain points and what opportunities there are for improvement. 

Participant selection is always important because we need to learn from people who have the right needs and are likely to encounter problems we want to solve. 

A depth interview is a good technique in discovery because it allows for insight into context, tools, behaviours and beliefs when understanding what tasks people are trying to complete. To do this we can ask questions like: 

• Talk me through, step by step, the last time you did <task>
• Why did you need to complete <task>?
• At each step, what was your experience like?
• Why did you find that difficult/easy?
• How often do you need to complete <task>?
• Is there anything else you need to do?

This information can be used to complete either an experience map or customer journey depending on which artefact is most helpful to your project. It can also identify additional important tasks that you didn’t know about before. 

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Baseline testing

If we’ve identified an issue through data, colleague or customer feedback and we want to understand more about how and why the issue occurs, the first step is to conduct a  baseline usability test. This gives us a clear starting point and assessment of how things currently are against a given set of measures and metrics. 

It involves identifying appropriate users to be participants and creating a study that would ask them to complete the tasks identified in planning. Tasks can be measured against task success, performance indicators and attitudinal perceptions. After a participant has completed all of the tasks, you can then go back and ask further questions about their thoughts, feelings, perceptions and reasoning.

The main benefit to baselining is that as we make changes, we are able to observe a change by tracking metrics. We can clearly show where we started and where we ended up because the tasks will remain the same, only the solution will change. 

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Iterative Usability Testing

We don’t often get things right the first time. The power of iterative testing allows us to make changes, get feedback and then adapt or adjust. 

When doing iterative testing, it’s important that the tasks always remain the same, it’s the design that will change. This mitigates against tasks accommodating the design rather than the design solving for the task.  It also allows us to measure improvement over time and traces everything back to our original research plan. If we discovered additional tasks during our user interviews, these should also be known to the team and added to the plan. 

By making sure the tasks are pre-identified and explicit and that metrics are reported on after every test, it’s easy to show change and direction. It’s not uncommon to run a test and see metrics going in the wrong direction at some point. This is important because it helps us to learn what doesn’t work and explore other solutions that will. 

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Measuring improvement

In order to measure improvement, we need to be able to observe a change. This means that we need to be able to show a number or a metric, increasing or decreasing as changes are made. 

The most obvious in usability testing is task success, we should see any previous tests that failed now being passed. The number of issues by type can also be tracked and over time, these issues should decrease in number showing improvement. Learn more about the metrics we use here.

Attitudinal questions are a bit more tricky because they are subjective, meaning that different people have different opinions. My 4 on a Likert scale might be another person's 3 or maybe I never give 5’s because of my beliefs. To measure improvement in this area, we need to show individual change over time. If the same participant said it was difficult to use or a 2 in the baseline test and then said it was easy to use or a 4 in the prototype test, we can clearly see a change in attitude.  

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Conclusion

By thinking about tasks during planning, the value of usability testing to show UX improvements is clear from the start of any project. It also means that we avoid creating tasks to fit our designs by defining them after we’ve come up with a solution, instead our designs solve for the task.

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Need Help?

If you’re new to user research, usability testing and UX or want expert input, we’re here to support you. Whether you're looking for advice, a helping hand or a full independent review, get in touch. 

Or, if you’re after a fast way of getting feedback on your prototype or website, check out our online usability evaluations.