This article was originally posted on the AppCues Academy.
And this is especially true with software. It’s rare that a new feature is perfect after its first build. And when things go wrong, they can go very wrong. Launching a bad product experience can mean hordes of upset customers, lost revenue and, of course, a waste of your team’s most precious resource: time.
So to mitigate these risks, we turn to user testing. User testing provides us the customer insights needed to ensure our next release isn’t a total flop. And whenever you are designing a new user onboarding flow, you’ll want to incorporate extensive user testing into the scope of the project. Testing your onboarding experience with real users before you release it will save you tons of time, and help eliminate confusion that makes users bounce.
Don’t have a UX researcher on your team? Not to worry. You don’t have to be a designer, developer or UX researcher to get great customer insights from user testing. But you do need to know how to ask the right people the right questions to come to important design conclusions. Here’s everything you need to know about how to run an effective user test (and how one particular user test helped HubSpot achieve a 400% lift in one of our KPIs).
For any substantial change to your product, like a new feature or a new user onboarding flow, we recommend you have no fewer than five interviews. You should keep testing until you are no longer surprised with the results. Surprisingly enough, you can expect a high response rate (about 50%) to these emails, so sometimes it’s best to only send 10 at a time until you have your desired number of tests scheduled. Also, remember to follow up after a few days to those who haven’t responded - you’d be surprised how many appointments get scheduled after a second attempt.
Encourage the user to think out loud. You want to hear everything that goes through the user’s head when completing the tasks.
Once you’re ready, share the task with your user and ask them to share their screen. At HubSpot, we give users clickable wireframes made with InVision. But this could also be a staging version of your software or even hand drawn mockups.
With each new screen or step in the task, first let the user think out loud and make note of his or her initial impressions. If you think there’s more to learn, there are some questions you can ask (download our user testing toolkit to check them out).
Once you’ve gone through all the tasks, wrap up the interview. Let them know that they’ve reached the end of the tasks, that their feedback was incredibly helpful (this part is really important - don't forget it!), thank them for their time and say goodbye. Shortly after the interview, follow up with a thank you email and promised gift.
Imporant note: After each interview, take 5 minutes with your team to go over what you just heard. This ensures everyone who was watching the interviews is on the same page with what just happened and leaves time for discussion and synthesis. This 5 minutes saves hours of debating and going over video later. It's one of the most important parts of the process.
“Oh I don’t have a web developer, I can’t [install the tracking code]!” - This user wasn’t familiar with the term “developer” and used “webmaster” instead. The user really did have all the resources she needed to be successful but didn't know it. We can use that information to remember to speak the language of our users.
“This is cool! This is all the stuff I did on HubSpot.” - Indicated that the contact timeline we showed made sense to this user in the way we intended.
You don’t need a lengthy write up on the findings. If you took 5 minutes after each interview to go over what happened, it should not take much time at all. Just get your team to agree on what the most important takeaways were, document them, and decide on next steps together. Here is how we document our user testing results at HubSpot.
Now’s the time to try your hand at user testing your onboarding flow. Start with designs, call trial users, and get feedback! Use that feedback to make something even better. You won’t get it right the first time, and maybe not even the 10th time, but keep trying. We’d love to see what you come up with.
Ready to dive in and get your hands dirty? Download our user testing toolkit to access schedules, proven email templates, and an example script to get started.