Skills Scratchpad: Crafting Effective Tasks For A Usability Study

Sedinam Worlanyo

UX Research | Edtech | Entrepreneurship

Published Aug 7, 2024

For my fellow Skills Scratchpaders? Paddies?(Is it time we came up with a group name?…). For entrepreneurs/teams building products, if you value making sure your team is building the thing right, then this glimpse into UX research might help. If you’re considering UX research and you like asking questions, watching videos of users using a product, and/or making sense of data, then this article might be for you too!

Welcome to Skills Scratchpad! cue my hype theme song for this week by Ghanaian musician Nana Yaw Ofori-Atta

A couple weeks back, I conducted an unmoderated usability study. “Unmoderated usability study”, in this context, is a UX research method where users reviewed a prototype and shared feedback based on written tasks I shared asynchronously. Tasks are specific activities that you want your participants to complete during the study that help you learn more about user behaviour.

It was one of the most efficient studies I've conducted, with the total time spanning under a week, from launching the study to synthesising to delivering impactful results which informed design iterations. My big takeaway that I was reminded of? There’s SO much you can learn from thoughtfully designing a research protocol that allows you to learn from participants thinking aloud and watching what they do. Sooo.. in the spirit of “learn, change, grow” (one of my favourite Coursera Values!), I thought I’d take a step back to reflect on the techniques used and share lessons learned for how to craft effective tasks for an impactful usability study.

First it’s important to understand the tradeoffs for an unmoderated usability study. Usability studies work particularly well where there are clear patterns of whether the research participant completed the task or failed to do what was intended and my team needed a clear “X didn’t work well- fix it in this specific way”. I therefore used this method because I wanted to catch any high-urgency fixes in a rapid way to inform design refinements before handing off to engineering.

One of the key potential tradeoffs for this method is that you’re not there live to ask follow-up questions so if understanding the deeper “why” of participant behaviour is important then this is not the method for that. Also, because you’re not there live, it’s even more important for you to write tasks clearly and effectively so here are some lessons I learned for writing clear, effective tasks:

Encourage users to put themselves in the experience by setting the context for where they are and what they are doing. E.g. Let's say your prototype is a travel booking homepage. You might say “Imagine you’re in Ghana looking to travel to Kenya. …how would you go about finding a flight? What information do you find useful on this homepage?”
Remind participants to think aloud. Thinking aloud is not something that people do naturally when going through products so it’s important in your instructions to remind participants so you’re able to capture their initial impressions/feedback.
Describe tasks in a specific, succinct way where someone can take it and perform the tasks without you being there. Depending on what you’re studying, some of these common questions can be useful in your tasks “Is there information you find confusing or missing?” “Click on the part of the page you expect to…?” This one is hard to get right and I’ve found that running a pilot with 1 or 2 people can help you refine your tasks and make them clearer.
Be careful about how you use technical jargon. If your team calls something “X” but it’s not a term people use more widely, chances are your users might not know what you’re talking about. However, if your goal is to test the jargon/copy in the interface, unmoderated can be a helpful way to test comprehension and bring evidence back to the team about how the jargon resonates.

With all things though..tips can be a helpful reference but hands-on practice helps you understand it better. So practice, practice, practice! I’m still practicing myself and one of the ways I want to push myself next would be writing effective tasks for different design variants rather than a single design flow. UX researchers, anything else you’d add that can help others? Would love to learn more!