Not everyone has time in their day to stop and watch usability tests, but we’ve found a couple of ways to share the UX Love in quick bits and pieces.
Our User Experience team hosted a pizza and usability test viewing party to help people find the time to check out a couple of videos. Lots of folks from all our departments (even The HR!) stopped in to nom some pizza and watch our users succeed and struggle with the app. Watching the videos collectively is like seeing live music with hundreds of your friends. We could all put on our headphones and check out the videos ourselves, but sharing the experience can be inspirational.
Immediately after the party we gathered as a team and started brainstorming solutions for a couple of the struggles we saw. Support started gathering help tickets for common issues. The webinar team sprung into action to help us recruit more users for future tests. Go team Chimp.
You Can Also Use Vimeo to Share
Another way to share your usability tests is to upload all your videos to a site like Vimeo. You can keep your tests password-protected or if you don’t mind having your videos public you can set up an RSS to email campaign in MailChimp with your Vimeo RSS feed. This will automatically send your videos to your UX team, or whoever wants to watch them, as soon as they are uploaded.
You can also create a transcript for each video in the “Description” field which will appear below the video display.
The transcript allows different departments to quickly scan to see if there are any slip ups or praises for their group and helps them address any issues right away without having to watch the entire video. You can also reference the video when posting problems to your dev team, with a time stamp included, so they can see problems happen for real.
Use the format 0:00 and you’ll get a clickable time stamp. You can also add links in the transcript if you need to reference certain pages in your site.
Continued Participation
After watching your usability videos, people throughout your company will have a much better idea of what you’re doing, how you’re making lives easier, and what you’re looking for when recruiting test participants. Your co-workers may even have friends who are using your service and might be willing be a test participant.
If you’d like to participate in a future study with MailChimp, let us know!
Who do you guys use for usability testing? Clicktale or someone else?
Hey Brandon, most of our tests are done by our UX team, but we’ve experimented with usertesting.com before.
Thank you very much for sharing your process! It’s great to see such team unity and collaboration between departments. I’m sure the pizza helped a bit ;)
What a great idea made better with a couple of beers too..!
In all seriousness though I have been part of many teams where the other disciplines are not fully aware of our role and see us as the Usability Police coming in the finding faults in there work, often not really believing the content in our reports. Having these guys in a less formal and less treatening social environment seeing the actual users finding difficulties and let’s not forget the positive aspects which are equally as useful. This would be quite powerful.
This is one idea that is going on th to-do list.
[...] their users and also hosting in-house usability test viewing parties. In this blog post by Jenn, Sharing the UX Love, she goes into more detail on how they’re getting into these different [...]
[...] their users and also hosting in-house usability test viewing parties. In this blog post by Jenn, Sharing the UX Love, she goes into more detail on how they’re getting into these different [...]
[...] their users and also hosting in-house usability test viewing parties. In this blog post by Jenn, Sharing the UX Love, she goes into more detail on how they’re getting into these different [...]
[...] We didn’t have to deviate from our normal usability test recordings in Silverback or change the way we share the videos with our team.Two days after testing the mobile team (plus me and Ben) were able to sit down, watch the videos [...]