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Usability Test Planning

Before conducting a usability test (aka user test), it is important to have a plan. There is no single correct way to write a test plan, but here are some items it may include:

  • Scope – What aspects or sections of what prototype, application or site are being tested (and which are not).

  • Goal – What are we trying to find out?

  • Measurements – How will we measure success?

  • Test session logistics – Where will the testing take place (most likely remotely) and how long the testing will be.

  • Equipment – Any devices needed to run the test on, record with, etc.

  • Participants – How many participants will we have and criteria defining an ideal participant. 

  • Procedure – At a high level, how the test will be run, and what participants will be asked to do.

Goal and measurements  

When going into a usability test, it’s important to have a purpose or goal i.e. what we wish to find out. A hypothesis is a specific assumption that can be tested to prove or disprove it; our goal will typically be to test whether or not one or more hypotheses is true. The products we create should be usable and help users achieve certain goals, so our usability testing hypotheses would be our assumptions that specific aspects of our solution will achieve specific outcomes for your users. 

From our hypothesis, we should create research questions that when answered, will help to either validate or invalidate the hypothesis. Research questions address things like:

  • How people use our site

  • Where people are clicking

  • Whether or not people understand our site

  • What people think about our site

  • How competitor sites are better/worse

Example Hypothesis: We believe that the VDB enables dispatchers to quickly and easily assign shipments to drivers.

Example Research questions:

  1. Will dispatchers understand the various methods for assigning in the VDB, for example, dragging and dropping an order from the shipments pane to the driver pane?

  2. Can dispatchers successfully complete the process of assigning multiple orders to drivers with little to no errors?

  3. Can dispatchers finish assigning orders in a short amount of time?

If through usability testing, all of these research questions are answered “yes”, then the team will consider the hypothesis validated. The team should also consider and document how they will measure success. How much time is considered short? How many errors are acceptable? What will be used as an indication that participants have understood or not understood something?

Note that: Research questions won’t be asked directly to our participants. They are for our team internally to understand the goals of the test and will guide our test tasks and questions.

Finding Target Users

One of the most important things in conducting usability testing is to test with the right people. In this example, we would want to find users who are in dispatching positions.

Tasks and Scenarios

Once we have our research questions, we can design our tasks, which may be in the context of a scenario. For example: “You’ve just received a number of new shipments. How would you go about assigning them out to drivers?”. This helps engage the participant in the task and provide more realism and motivation than simply saying “Assign a shipment”. A key thing that differentiates usability testing from something like a discovery interview is that you are asking your study participants to do something.