More efficient Usability Testing with this template

I’m always surprised by the number of designers who don’t test their products with real users. Most of the time is they don’t know where or how to start testing. Running user testing sessions is easy to do once you know how to do it. There are plenty of resources online that will help you become better at running them — I even link to a few at the bottom of this article. I’m not going to explain how to perform user testing, but I want to share a template that we use for performing user testing sessions. And also an example of the template being used in a project. TLDR; both links are at the bottom.

We run quite a few user testing sessions; in fact, we love running them, we’re addicted to running them. We try to run them as much as we can, and I created a template to help us become more efficient at performing user testing. And that is the template I’m going to share with you today.

This simple template has really upped our game in terms of running user testing.

The template in its raw form. Click here to view the live version.

The benefits we’ve experienced are:

1. It helps us prepare by stopping us from procrastinating when we’re getting ready for a user testing session. You know that feeling of “oh shit, where do I start?”, well it helps us say goodbye to that.
2. It helps us be more consistent in how we perform user testing. It is a process after all, and processes should be repeatable.
3. It dramatically speeds up the time it takes for us to review results. No more, “I need a few hours to transfer my notes that I wrote down into an online version”.
4. And if we’ve got the results quicker, we can make decisions faster.
5. Lastly, it is a source, a record of what we did, and what the outcome was. This allows us to share findings with teams for future projects. And we can even share these docs with stakeholders, and because we keep them brief, people actually read them.

Ok so enough nonsense about how bloody great it is, and more about how to do I use it.

How we use it

The best thing about the template is how easy it is for our team to use to run user testing sessions efficiently. Before I’m But first, let me explain how we run moderated user testing…