The ultimate Notion template to analyse your usability tests
It takes just two days to understand your users better with this template.
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Watching users struggle with your product delivers better insights than almost any other form of research. But usability testing seems like a lot of work. Finding candidates to test your product then conducting the tests takes time. Making sense of the tests can take even longer. I’m here to tell you that needn’t be the case.
I’ve been conducting usability tests on prototypes and finished products for 5 years. At the beginning, I found usability testing a slog. The took a long time and produced mountains of sticky notes. I often found myself lost in a sea of qualitative data. But over the years I’ve managed to improve my process. A turning point came when I began using Notion to categorise and summarise data from usability tests. If you don’t know Notion, it’s an awesome modular tool that lets you build custom workspaces.
Using some simple steps I can turn around a usability test in around two days. That’s one day to test the product with 5 users and one day to make sense of all the data. That’s not a huge investment to gain a better understanding of your users.
Here are the steps I take when conducting usability testing.
Define your user group and find the testers
Jakob Nielsen is a leading UX expert. (Jakob’s Law of UX is named after him). Nielsen observed that you only need 5 users to find 85% of UX issues. Testing with more than 5 users produced diminishing returns as he found fewer new UX issues.
But there’s a catch. When testing with small groups you need to make sure the groups are made of similar users who are trying to achieve similar goals. So pick your users wisely. Test for a specific sub-section of your customer base.
If you’re struggling to recruit a similar group of users from your customer base, you can use services like User Testing who can help you find groups of specified users.
Note: Keeping track of testers can get complicated, especially if you’re doing lots of tests. Here’s a template that helps solve that problem.
Tell the users what your product does
You need to give users context and a goal to achieve when conducting tests. Here’s an example I used in a recent usability test.
“This is a music production app that allows you to make music on your own and collaboratively. Please go ahead and try to make some music with the app.”
It’s also good at this stage to reinforce that you won’t be offended if the feedback is not good. I always tell the user, “We’re testing the product, not you.”
Observe the users
Now the fun part. Watch the user try to achieve their goal.
You should ask the user to “think aloud” as they use your app. This gives you an ongoing commentary of how the user is using your app. You may have to remind the user to do think aloud as it’s a somewhat unnatural exercise. You can also prompt the user to say how they’re feeling throughout the process. A pro tip is to look out for body language and tone of voice to infer a user’s emotional state.
You should also ask the user to state their goals throughout the usability test. This will give you sub-goals that will contribute to the main goal you have asked them to achieve. For example if a user is using an app that allows them to create music, they’ll likely have a series of sub-goals such as “I want to play some musical notes”. Highlighting these sub-goals will help you pin-point problems to solve for your users.
Don’t influence the user into liking or disliking your product. Make sure not to help them if they get stuck. Observing where users struggle will be the most valuable lesson.
Record your usability tests and take notes as you go. Make sure you get the user to talk aloud and take notes on the user’s emotional state and body language throughout. Make sure to note if the user completes their given task. Make sure to note how long it took them to complete their task. These are two very important metrics for measuring usability.
Note: If you’re testing a web product remotely a video call with screen-share is a perfectly fine way of conducting a usability test. Just make sure that you remind the user to think aloud and describe their feelings as you won’t be able to see them.
Note: If you want to go deeper into how to conduct usability tests, there’s a wealth of information written by experts in the field. Dave Travis’ ‘Think Like a UX Researcher’ is just one resource I’d recommend for improving your usability testing knowledge.
Test for value
The end of your usability test is a great time for value testing. Ask your users if they are likely to pay for your product. If your product is revenue neutral, you can ask if they would recommend the product to others. It’s also a great idea to ask the user why they came to their decision.
Understanding how your users value your product is useful in relating your tests to business metrics. Highlighting these relationships will make the results of your testing much more persuasive.
Make sense of the data in Notion
Now it’s time to make sense of the data you have collected. That’s where Notion comes in. Go back through your notes and recordings and for each observation fill out a card in Notion. The card should contain:
- Tester Name — What is the user’s name.
- Description — What the user did at this point.
- Quote — What the user said at this point. You should have been encouraging the user to “think out loud”, so there should be plenty of quotes.
- Emotions — How the user felt at this point.
- Issue type — Does the user’s experience fit into a broad category? It might make sense to fill this out after transcribing all your user tests.
- Common Issue — Did many users have a similar experience with this part of the product?
- Major Issue — This is to highlight any issues that would significantly impact the user completing their goal. Even if only one user had this experience, these kinds of major issues are worth highlighting.
- Value Testing — If the user would pay for or or recommend the product.
- Screenshot — This can come in handy if you want to provide further context to an issue. This is especially helpful for highlighting bugs. You don’t have to add a screenshot for every card.
I’ve created a template so that you can recreate my process.
Pro tip: Add new testers as a group, and add new cards to the bottom of each group. That way you don’t need to add user names to any card.
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Use Notion to assess the data
By the time you’ve transcribed your last usability test you should have many cards filled with data.
Here’s where your hard work pays off. You can use the “Group by” function to analyse the data quickly. By grouping by emotions you can see areas of the app that made your users unhappy or happy. By grouping issue types you can also find the most common issues found in the app. You may want to spend some time finessing the issue categorisation as the way you’ve categorised issues may be too broad or two narrow.
At the end you should have a detailed overview of the common issues, themes, and scope of the customer problems and needs in one place.
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Quantify the data
You can use the group function to turn the qualitative data into quantitative data. You can
- By emotion
- By issues type
- By common issues
- By Major issues
I’d recommend turning these into graphs, which can serve as powerful persuasive tools.
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Make sense of the data
After you’ve analysed your data you’ll need to communicate what it all means. It’s tempting to highlight every UX problem you’ve found, but I prefer to focus on the two most important problems to solve. Here’s where you can combine your tags and value testing to present a compelling argument that these problems should be addressed. Linking the qualitative data to a business outcome is really powerful and persuasive.
For example, you might have a very common issue that caused users to have a negative experience in the product. You might also find that all users that experienced the issue were unlikely to pay for your product.
Summarise your data in a way that’s succinct and persuasive. Key things to consider are:
- What are the main problems? Highlight the two most important usability issues to fix. You’re unlikely to have time to fix everything, so focus on the most pressing issues first.
- Why are they so important to fix? Try and explain why these are problems for the user and how these problems will impact key business metrics or business strategy. If you can explain these problems with UX theory, now’s a good point to drop that knowledge.
- What are the solutions? You should try to avoid presenting a problem without presenting some kind of solution. Your goal is not to nail the final solution, but to suggest a path forward. Of course, you’ll have to test this solution with real customers — so be ready for another round of usability testing as you validate your solution.
I’d recommend doing this kind of usability testing at the start of any product discovery process. These steps can help you get to understand your user’s problems quickly and will hopefully help you build impactful solutions.
Note: For those that skipped to the end, here’s a link to the Notion template.