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How to Run Live User Testing

By ling on April 17th, 2014 in Business

The more neutral the location, the better. As tempting as it might be to use your company’s conference room, I’d recommend not bringing users into the corporate office. Use a friend’s office or co-working space.
Use Craiglist to recruit testers: we posted a job opportunity to the jobs/et-cetera section of Craigslist. In this relatively short post, we give very little information, except we are looking for people to participate in a usability study, they’ll need to be okay signing an NDA and being filmed, and we are willing to pay them for their time (in this case, a $75 Amazon gift card for a 60 minute meeting).
The post did not let users email reply. Instead, there was a link to a Google form we built above. That made it super easy for consolidate and organize everyone’s responses.
Decide which type of users you want to test on (very important step): create a Google Forms survey that would help you clearly identify if the potential tester fit your target profile. Include several timeslots in the survey already to schedule for the real testing.
People are VERY flaky. Have a backup list of people in case your first choices are not available / bail last minute. Inform your backup candidates that they are on a back up list.