Abstract: Through my 12 plus years designing and delivering products, I've come to give tremendous value in testing with users, as well as through QA tests. And I believe everyone on a product or development team can learn enough about how to test a product, feature or prototype with users, to at least understand the effort and value, and, at best, do it themselves successfully. I've also come to realize that, as a researcher, I often had too little time to brief or train enough my developers, testers or product owner to really empower them so they could contribute positively to the research effort, and feel an ownership of the insights identified, and am hoping to pass on the knowledge straight to teams to help designers everywhere.
In this workshop, I'll share user testing practices, techniques, and skills that will help you, a non-designer or researcher, contribute to, or even run testing with users. I'll particularly focus on all that can be done on agile-only projects, where outcomes and insights need to processed promptly and efficiently. I've identified two key areas of value: note taking and facilitating. Note taking is often asked of the team when viewing a session, however, there are a few subtleties to taking notes that make them either easy to analyze, or useless, and I'll share on that. The other key knowledge is the actual facilitation of tests, and I'll invite you to consider all it encompasses, in order to nourish your personal reflection on skills and practices.
Created specifically for non-designers, this workshop aims to upskill participants in taking valuable notes when observing sessions, and understand how testing needs to be facilitated in order to obtain robust insights. These skills can then be shared, in order to enable the team to be more efficient a conducting research, and become a balanced team where research isn't bottlenecked by the capacity of a trained researcher or designer.
Comprising contextual theory, and a lot of hands-on practice as well as tools to reflect on performance and progress, this workshop will leave you better informed on testing with users, a better collaborator to research that may be ongoing with your product or service, and a more understanding colleague to designers and researchers.
This session welcomes further questions on research and will allow ample time for discussions.
Learning Outcomes: - - Understanding of the 5 steps of user research
- - Understand how user testing can fit in agile cadences
- - Note-taking skills to efficiently contribute to research
- - Basics of facilitating a test
