Unpack the why behind usability suggestions

When usability testing, participants often suggest improvements.

DON'T:

• Participant: "Could you make this chart bigger so I can better see the details."
• Researcher: [Got it. Usability issue: "Chart is not big enough."]

These suggestions are not usability improvements. These are feature requests and should be handled accordingly.

It is widely known among UXRs that one shouldn't take feature requests at face value. When the user suggests a solution, we should figure out what is the underlying problem that the solution would solve for them, because

1) the solution that the user suggested may not be the best. Our UXD could design a better solution if they knew what to solve.

2) the solution that the user suggested only works for them. Our UXD could design a more generic solution that works for the rest of the userbase too.

Despite most UXRs being aware of this, I see feature requests taken at face value all too often. I think the reason is that feature requests come in disguise.

To help you notice feature requests, here are the two most common ways participants bring them up on usability tests:

Usability improvement suggestions

• Participant: "Could you make this chart bigger so I can better see the details."
• Researcher: "What details would you like to see better and what would you do with that piece of information?"
• Participant: "I want to look at each day individually. 'How much traffic we had on Black Friday? How much traffic the day before Black Friday? What about the Monday after...? I need to brief my IT Team to be ready on the peak days so they can relaunch the site if it goes down...'

Questions about functionality

• Participant: "Can I zoom into this chart?"
• Researcher: "How would that help you?"
• Participant: "I want to look at each day individually..."

Consider these two scenarios.

DON'T

• Researcher: "Users said they need the chart to be bigger."
• Designer: [Makes the chart stretch across the screen. Still not showing daily granularity]

DO

• Researcher: Users said they would like to see the traffic in daily resolution because they want to know their peak days on which their IT should be ready to jump in and fix the site if it goes down.
• Designer: [Adds a slider that adjusts the granularity of the timeline. Highlights peaks.]