Testing with users

Testing is a big topic, and there’s plenty of information available about specific techniques. Sheila Pontis’s book Making sense of field research¹ is a great resource. She sees information design as in transition towards a more professional approach, less solely reliant on individual expertise:

The challenge for information designers is to integrate their creative and apparently “messy” way of working with a more systematic and rigorous approach, focused on collecting evidence from people in the field and using that to enhance and support the information design process and decisions made along the way.¹

Sheila advocates qualitative research, rather than just chasing data about performance. She proposes a research-led design process that

...combines existing theoretical work, observations of design colleagues, learnings from many cohorts of students, and my own experience as a professional information design and researcher. (page 30).

Your test method should relate to the goals of your client and their users. For example:

Electricity bill: do they know how much to pay, and how to pay? Can they find all the information they need? You can set up an online test and time how long it takes them to find the correct answer.

Form: observe people filling in the form. Ask them to read and think aloud as they do so. This should alert you to things they fail to notice, questions they don’t understand, and questions that are asked in way they can’t answer. You can do this online with video conferencing.

Rules, regulations and processes (for example, how to get a driver’s licence, or how to apply to college): with longer processes you could get them to do a user edit, or a ‘traffic light’ assessment in which they mark the document (or, if it’s an app or website, a diagram of the process) with colours – green for easy, red for complete incomprehension, and yellow for ‘could be better’.

1. Sheila Pontis (2019) Making sense of field research: a practical guide for information designers. Routledge.