It’s All About The Users

Leveraging Guerilla testing to make quick product design decisions.

Aesthetics are irrelevant if the interaction fails to be a delighting experience. A meaningful UX experience is at the core of user satisfaction, and that is what we aim to achieve at Townscript.

One approach to make sure that our designs are per the user expectations is to conduct usability testing, wherein we plan well in advance on how the study would go, a testing plan is made, users are recruited and the usability testing is carried out in a decided time.

But there come times when we have to validate a UX design idea quickly to ensure that the change we are planning to do will sit well with our users. So how do we make sure that this is achieved while keeping our decision-making process speedy and without having to spend too much time on it?

The answer is to leverage the concept of Guerilla testing.

Guerilla testing is a low cost and speedy method of collecting user feedback to validate and invalidate design ideas. This approach takes you to coffee shops or any other public places and has people use your website or a prototype resulting in you receiving real-time user feedback.

To tell you how we did it, at Townscript we decided to change the event ticket booking experience for our users. The designers came up with some intriguing designs, and we were all set to improve the booking experience for good, but instead of diving into it headfirst we wanted to take this new approach to our users and find out how they will feel about it, and we wanted to do this in a short span of time.

So we made two dummy events, one on our website with the existing design and the other, a clickable prototype of the new design using the Justinmind prototyping tool.

Sanketh Sampara, who is the Product Designer at Townscript, and I took the prototype to a coffee shop and gently approached people to use our prototype/website to book few dummy tickets and to think out loud when they do that while we recorded them (with their permission) and in return, we bought them a cup of coffee as a gesture of gratitude. It took us two trips to the coffee shops to get 20 users to use our prototype/website.

Guerilla testing helped us in getting some excellent insights from our users and revealed the flaws in our new designs which we had to revisit to keep our designs user optimised. It also revealed exciting patterns about how users think when they make ticket bookings for events and what more do they expect.

Some pointers to keep in mind for Guerilla testing:

1. You need to be very clear about what aspect of your design you need to validate as users might not be willing to spend a long time answering your questions or trying multiple things.
2. Make sure to remind the users to think out loud, so that you get an understanding of how users perceive your designs.
3. With the user’s permission record the interaction so that you don’t have to take notes and can focus on observing the user.
4. Last but the most important is to make sure you are not interrupting the user in their personal space and try to make the user comfortable with friendly conversations and positive body language.

Not only is guerilla testing quick and low in cost, but it also results in users giving their honest feedback because they are in surroundings that are comfortable for them and hence they will be more willing to have open discussions.

I, personally, had a great deal of fun while doing Guerilla testing and am looking forward to many more.