Storytelling for Richer Usability Tests
I recently read Storytelling for User Experience by Whitney Quesenbery & Kevin Brooks. While I enjoyed the book, it’s focus was primarily on how one uses the art of storytelling to communicate research findings, promote empathy and even sell design ideas to stakeholders. There was however, a great deal of focus within the book on how to listen. Seems simple enough right? You listen to things and people all day, every day. In actuality, active listening is hard work, it takes thought…and genuine consideration for the person you’re listening to. I was quickly convinced that listening is the most valuable tool you have in your arsenal for research.
As I continued through that book, I began to think of practical applications of storytelling while conducting research. This seems fairly obvious when thinking of interviews and the like, but being in a start-up environment, I very often “piggy-back” methods to optimize my already tight time-line and budget. I felt like storytelling can be applied in one on one research activities and also, promoting participants to tell stories themselves.
For context sake, I’ll briefly cover my most common research activity, usability testing “piggy-backed” with non-directed interviews. The way in which we run these research sessions starts very much as you’d expect with defining the goals of the research. What do we want to find? I’ll cover that with our CEO and begin writing a short questionnaire to allow for appropriate screening of participants who respond to our ad(s). Once we choose the folks that we think are a good fit for the research, we ask them to come in, generally for about an hour. During that hour, we ask people to take a look at our website and have a casual discussion either before or after.
How I used storytelling to improve our research
Historically, we would run the usability test first. That process was predictable for the most part, to anyone who’s participated in or conducted such research. Afterward, we would have a discussion about what they saw, liked and didn’t like. I’d ask questions about how they made certain decisions on and offline and allow for my observer to take the opportunity to ask any questions regarding what they saw during the usability session.
In the last case in particular, I encouraged (subtly influenced?) people to tell me stories. Being that it was shortly after the holidays, many of these stories were fresh in their mind. The main change to my research format was that I held the interview before the actual usability session, where they would take a look at the website. Having people tell stories about their past (and hopefully relatively recent) experiences with doing similar tasks, allowed me the opportunity to make note of “flags” for parts of their story that I could use to place them in context of completing a task on our website.
How holding an interview before the usability test made a difference
During the interview this time, I really encouraged people to tell me about their experiences for making decisions online (in this case, decisions regarding their holiday season). I had to work hard to just listen, but when I did, as they told stories I was able to gather mental notes about particular things and dig for further detail. Now, so far that isn’t anything new for a non-directed interview, but this case, I was able to rely on the context(s) in which people recalled making decisions. This was the biggest advantage over how I was conducting research sessions of this kind previously. For instance, before, we’d have a list of tasks we would want to see people complete. Often, we would have to ask someone to complete a task that wasn’t in the natural flow of how they’d visit the website.
Before example:
Task: see if people can successfully compare items
Me: “…ok, now I’d like you to try and compare ‘item x’ and ‘item y’…”
This time, however, even if we weren’t close to a task we’d want to see next, I would be able to place them in a real, past context of their story instead of “make believe” for a task. In almost every situation, the person would pick up the story they were telling and without prompt begin to dive in even deeper as to how they completed it before while also showing us how they would do so for our website.
After storytelling:
Task: see if people can successfully compare items
Me: “So, you were telling me about how you were looking for a new TV a few months ago, and you did some comparison shopping - could you show me how you would do that here?”
In the end, we gathered much richer qualitative feedback than previous sessions since we had people tell us stories about their real past experiences, while at the same time demonstrating how they would attempt to reach their goal with the website being tested. Ultimately, this exponentially enhanced the depth of the “data points” we would get from the think-aloud activity during usability tests.
