Running usability studies

A theme throughout this chapter has been the limitation of your point of view and the importance of gaining feedback from real users to find the areas that confuse them. At different times, you can use your naivety about a new feature, for instance, to play the role of a customer, but there is no escaping your experience since you work with your product so much. For that reason, getting feedback from real users is a vital part of UX testing, even more than beta testing or other types of testing the product with users.

There are many different ways to gather feedback from users, of which we will consider four key ones here: recorded sessions, questionnaires, A/B testing, and instrumentation.

Recorded sessions

Recorded sessions involve gathering volunteers and presenting them with the new feature and a task to complete. They get no other instructions but are advised to think out loud to explain what they are doing and why during the recorded session...