UX Research Blog

We’ve all been there. You need to get user feedback on five different things this week before a big launch. You barely have enough time to schedule the usability tests, let alone moderate them. Using a 3rd party isn’t an option.

Sometimes you don’t need 30 minutes to walk through a mockup with a user; sometimes you can’t find a time you both are free; and sometimes you just need a get hacky. Enter: the easiest usability test ever. 

Us user researchers love to say, “test often, test always.” It’s rarely “too early” to test a design, whether it be scribbled on a napkin or a clickable mockup. If you’re ever looking to test an early stage mockup, we’ve seen huge success with including your users’ real data in the mockup. This gives you the opportunity to not only test something without having it built out and still make it easy on the user to complete the usability study. 

This was originally posted on the HubSpot Development blog.

The HubSpot usability team loves to get feedback on apps we’re developing to make our customer's marketing lives easier. But testing in the mobile environment presents a unique set of challenges. We recently devised a system that allows us to get much more insight from our testing sprints with real mobile users, using real apps in their natural environment -- in situ -- and discovered a whole new set of questions we were able to ask as a result.

If you’re looking for an easy way to get started with some user research around your product and really find out how your product fits with what your users need and want, a beta program is one of the ways to feedback and get the product in the hands of users quickly. If you’re just getting started, a beta program does takes some time to get going. But after that, it’s basically just maintenance. By definition, a beta test is a trial of software in the final stages of its development, carried out by someone not directly developing the product. Beta tests give you actionable feedback and useful data that will make your product measurably better. Once you see how valuable it is to get users’ eyes on features prior to releasing them, you won’t go back. Beta testing helps you see if users will actually use a feature, where as other research, like customer stories, personas and usability testing, tell you if something is valuable and usable.

Being a UX researcher isn’t a one-lady show. There’s no way we can do it alone. Even though there are only two of us at HubSpot, we work with many incredibly talented people throughout the process of helping to make a new piece of software more user friendly. But for now, let’s just cover the top six.

At HubSpot, we are often gathering feedback from our customers. We give users opportunities to provide it while in the actual software, as well as quarterly customer happiness surveys. Once collected, this data is readily available for the entire company, and I was on a mission to use it.

Have you ever filled out a survey and felt like no one was really looking at the results? This is pretty common when happiness surveys are sent out via email to a large customer base for any website, software or store. This is no different at HubSpot - some customers assume it’s sent out and collected by a third party with no real pull. While this is not the case (we have an employee dedicated to analyzing these surveys), there is no real follow-up with the customers after they provide these thoughts. That’s where the user research team comes in.

One of the most important aspects of conducting successful usability tests is having the best users possible. At HubSpot, we have a database of 300+ customers who are eager and willing to help us at the drop of a hat. However, there are plenty of situations where testing current users of our software would not be helpful, so we begin a search for non-customers.

Recruiting non-users for usability studies is much harder than the process of finding people who use your product. Some of the main issues I’ve encountered are:

• They don’t owe you anything - you’re not helping them at the moment
• If they don’t show for the test, it’s no loss to them
• They are solely speaking with you for the gift at the end of the test

I’ve had my fair share of duds when recruiting for non-user testing, so I’ve adapted and created a process that works best for me here at HubSpot. I learned a lot from Google Venture’s Michael Margolis in his blog post on recruiting, and have created a flow that works best for me when finding participants for a non-user test.

Documentation is everywhere, whether it is in the form of a user manual for a new television, an article on how to use Photoshop, or a recipe for how to bake a chocolate cream torte. As the documentation writer on the UX team at HubSpot, I write user guides that 920-192 cover all aspects of the tools in the product, from their basic functions to best practices and strategy. Through my writing adventure, I have gathered some advice for creating top-notch documentation.