Posts Tagged ‘BekahRice’
[NDCMelbourne2025] DIY Usability Testing When You Have No Time and No Budget – Bekah Rice
In an insightful presentation at NDC Melbourne 2025, Bekah Rice, a UX consultant from True Matter, delivers a practical guide to conducting usability testing without the luxury of extensive time or financial resources. Drawing from her experience at a South Carolina-based UX consultancy, Bekah outlines an eight-step process to gather meaningful qualitative data, enabling developers and designers to refine digital products effectively. Her approach, demonstrated through a live usability test, underscores the importance of observing real user interactions to uncover design flaws and enhance user experience, even with minimal resources.
Step One: Preparing the Test Material
Bekah begins by emphasizing the need for a testable artifact, which need not be a fully developed product. A simple sketch, paper prototype, or a digital mockup created in tools like Figma can suffice. The key is to ensure the prototype provides enough context to mimic real-world usage. For instance, Bekah shares her plan to test a 12-year-old hospital website, currently undergoing a redesign, to identify usability issues. This approach allows teams to evaluate user interactions early, even before development begins, ensuring the product aligns with user needs from the outset.
Crafting Effective Tasks
The second step involves designing realistic tasks that reflect the user’s typical interactions with the product. Bekah illustrates this with a scenario for the hospital website, where users are asked to make an appointment with a doctor for regular care after moving to a new town. By phrasing tasks as open-ended questions and avoiding UI-specific terminology, she ensures users are not inadvertently guided toward specific actions. This method, she explains, reveals genuine user behavior, including potential failures, which are critical for identifying design shortcomings.
Recruiting the Right Participants
Finding suitable testers is crucial, and Bekah advocates for a pragmatic approach when resources are scarce. Instead of recruiting strangers, she suggests leveraging colleagues from unrelated departments, friends, or family members who are unfamiliar with the product. For the hospital website test, she selects Adam, a 39-year-old artist and warehouse tech, as a representative user. Bekah warns against testing with stakeholders or developers, as their biases can skew results. Offering small incentives, like coffee or lunch, can encourage participation, making the process feasible even on a tight budget.
Setting Up and Conducting the Test
Creating a comfortable testing environment and using minimal equipment are central to Bekah’s DIY approach. A quiet space, such as a conference room or a coffee shop, can replicate the user’s typical context. During the live demo, Bekah uses Adam’s iPhone to conduct the test, highlighting that borrowed devices can work if they allow observation. She also stresses the importance of a note-taking “sidekick” to record patterns and insights, which proved invaluable when Adam repeatedly missed critical UI elements, revealing design flaws like unclear button labels and missing appointment options.
Analyzing and Reporting Findings
The final step involves translating observations into actionable insights. Bekah emphasizes documenting both successes and failures, as seen when Adam struggled with the hospital website’s navigation but eventually found a phone number as a fallback. Immediate reporting to the team ensures fresh insights drive improvements, such as adding a map to the interface or renaming buttons for clarity. By presenting findings in simple bullet lists or visually appealing reports, teams can effectively communicate changes to stakeholders, ensuring the product evolves to meet user needs.