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“Pay attention to what users do, not what they say.”
Some of the least expected things get exposed during user testing. Have a look at a few seemingly simple examples that had a major impact.
At times we conducted user testing sessions with our internal sales team. I loved having one of our primary personas in the next room.
In one of our sessions, we were testing the usability of our new interface for finding companies. We had struggled in previous versions with how to display more companies than would fit on the screen.
Before the user testing, we had a drop-down mechanism to progress beyond the companies visible on the screen.
During the testing, I watched the participant (on a mac) try to use his trackpad to swipe right and scroll the list of companies. Given that other participants struggled as well, we make a simple change and made the list scrollable left to right.
Our next round of user testing validated we made the right change.
When doing some user testing for a newly developed feature that relied heavily on filters and lists, we found a variety of cases where users were confused about seeing zero results on a list they expected to see results.
We identified that it was a) not clear that the filters were applied and b) not clear why a list was empty.
We introduced a better indicator to show that filters were applied by providing more contrast. Additionally, we added a message and graphic to explain why a list might be empty and how to populate it.
Our challenge had been to find a way to make lists visible and workable across a user's organization without overwhelming them with every single list of prospects at the company.
"Borrowing" from Google Inbox we introduced the idea of pinning a list so you could instantly access only those lists that were important to you.
While the concept was great, it was lost on enough users that we knew we had to do something about it.
Rather than ditching the idea of pinning we simplified the UI around the pin toggle and showed the pin indicator in the same column as the toggle.
These simple changes steared the user to figure our the concept on their own.
In a similar vein as the filtering example, we uncovered a usability issue to a problem we weren't even trying to solve.
We introduced a new UI and frequently asked for features which of course involved user testing sessions.
In many of them, we saw users attempt to click on the table headers to sort the lists. That lead to making each column sortable.
It also exposed a use case that we nailed by allowing for the last activity date to be sortable.
Users could then attack each prospect in the list based on their most recent outreach.
“Pay attention to what users do, not what they say.”