User studies: best practices

Question

What are the best practices for user studies?
Did you ever conduct one?

Answer 1

Steve Krug's book Don't Make Me Think has some great info (a whole chapter if I recall correctly) on this.

The main thing I learned and have applied again and again is to get users in front of your software early. Just watching 2 or 3 users try to interact with your software will tell you right away where you biggest problems are. Once you've fixed those, you get people in again and see what your next biggest problems are right away, rinse, repeat.

Answer 2

You can get information from users in many ways. :

• Observe them, see what they do, where they fail, what they try, where they look for the solution
• Get them to share their thoughts while they're using your software, what they're looking for, what they expect, what annoys them
• Debrief them (oral or written questionnaire) about their overall impressions and suggestions

They may not tell you directly what should be changed ("label the buttons"), but you'll see the important patterns emerge (many users mutter "which button was it again?").

In my experience, measuring the time/clicks they need to accomplish a task should have been done at the design stage, and it is not very useful anymore at the stage of user studies with a functional product.