One obvious use of stories is to create scenarios for participants in a usability test. The stories establishing goals and motivations can also provide a starting point for any usability-testing task. For example, you could take Ginny Redish’s story from Chapter 8, and turn it around for this purpose:

Your stories can also be used as the starting point for a more open session, allowing the test participant to customize the tasks to match their own situation. This can be a more difficult session to moderate. You have to be able to think on your feet to react to the participant’s ideas. But the result can be richer information from the session.

Find out what your participants want to know at the beginning of the session. Ask about their interests first—before you introduce the site or material you are testing. For example, if you are testing an ecommerce site, find out what they might want to purchase and why.

Some people have trouble coming up with specific ideas on the spot, so you might want to ask them on a pre-session questionnaire. This gives them time to think about their choices without the pressure of someone waiting for them to answer.

You can also ask the participants to recall the last time they were on a site like yours. Or the last time they faced a situation similar to one you want to test. Give them a chance to tell you the story.

At this point you can either let their own stories guide the sessions, or you can adapt the tasks from a prepared list, picking the ones closest to their own questions or tasks.

If you write tasks so that you can fill in the blank with information about the participants’ own interests, the adaptation is easier.

Another solution is to let them select tasks to complete from a list with some degree of variety. This way, you don’t ask them to try tasks they are not interested in, or would not try on their own.

Apala Chavan, from Human Factors International, created a way of using stories to make usability test tasks compelling. She says that people in Asia are hesitant to say that a design is bad or to admit that they had trouble using it. Her solution was something she called “The Bollywood Technique,” after the storytelling style of movies from Bollywood, the Hollywood of India. These movies are full of complex, emotionally charged plots, so Chavan created a situation in which the participants were asked to enter into a story such as this one:

The addition of a story lets participants dive in with excitement and point out things that made it difficult for them to solve the problem. You may not need to create such a broad fantasy, but a little storytelling can make your tasks more compelling than a dry set of instructions.

We hate to admit it, but sometimes user experience people arrive on the scene just in time for usability testing. There are no stories and not much user research to create a meaningful set of tasks for the usability test sessions.

“Just-in-Time” Stories

Ginny Redish told us what she did when she was brought into a project late in the design stage. With no user stories to draw on, she combined story gathering with usability testing.

The developers had already created a prototype. It was based on requirements that had been gathered by asking customers—not users—what new features they wanted. No one had seen users at work. I suggested combining user site visits with usability tests of the prototype.

At each site, we spent time with users, observing their normal routine and gathering their stories about how they worked.

Then the team moved into a conference room and a few of the users came in individually to try out the prototype. The stories the team had just gathered became the scenarios for the usability test.

At the first site, the team learned that there was an entire step in the users’ process that the developers had been unaware of and had not designed for.

These same sorts of stories can be used for an expert evaluation or a walkthrough of the design. By establishing a minimal character (or using a persona) and walking through the task from their perspective, you are less likely to simply follow the logical flow of the application and more likely to use the product the way a real user might.

Stories and personas are a great way to add structure to the review of a design. Give each person around the table a different persona and task and ask them to do the following:

One danger of this sort of review is that, if you don’t know your users well (or don’t have good personas), you may find yourself falling back into looking at the site from an insider’s perspective. The group should be ready to challenge decisions that seem to simply follow the path of the design structure.

Or you may simply not have enough information to make a good decision. This is a good way to identify gaps in your knowledge; it can be the beginning of a lively discussion.

In either case, all the stories you selected while you analyzed the user research are invaluable. Use them to illustrate possible interpretations.

Like any user research, usability test sessions are an opportunity to collect stories. Sometimes, you’ll find new information about the user context and learn new questions to ask next time.

They Use it Where?

Randolph Bias teaches usability in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. His students conduct usability studies for local nonprofit organizations to get experience on real projects.

One project was for a local nonprofit human services agency. The site was divided into different sections, each describing a different type of support the organization offered. The agency assumed that visitors would bookmark the home page of the section that was appropriate for them.

What my students learned was that most of their visitors did not have Internet access at home, and they were accessing the Web from the public library. This meant that relying on personal “favorites” was not going to work, and that the home page needed to help them get to the right page quickly.

As we worked through the site, my students also realized that there were other implications about using this site in a public place where there was little privacy.

The agency and the constituents they served (though they didn’t know it) benefitted from my students’ UCD work.

You can use an evaluation session for dual purposes. If you mix your specific tasks or interview questions with open questions to collect stories, you may gather enough information for two different reports: one on the specific topic of the user research or usability session, and one on the contextual information you gather.

Two Research Events in One Session

In one usability test, we were interested in how well the users could navigate a search form with sections that could be opened and closed to reveal fields that were used only in specific circumstances. We knew that users found the original form too long, but had also learned that they didn’t want to choose between a “basic” and “advanced” version of search.

The designers created a prototype for a new idea, but weren’t sure if users would find the new interaction easy.

We knew that people in different situations would use the database differently, so we started the sessions by asking the participants to describe some recent occasions when they had searched this database. From that information, we chose appropriate scenarios for them so we could watch how they worked.

Some of the people observing the usability test told us that they were finding the initial discussion very useful. Not only were the participants talking about their work, but also they were showing us sites that they used and information they had found particularly useful. The observers were hearing and seeing things about how these users worked that they had never been able to observe before.

In the end, we created two reports. The first was a simple usability report on how the form design worked, which we could use to improve it. The second described everything we had learned about the context in which people might use that site, which we could use in many different ways. This gave the designers looking for immediate recommendations a short report they could work from, but also preserved the more general information in a form that the whole team could use.

Usability evaluation may not seem like a place for stories, but any time you work with users you have an opportunity to listen for stories.

“The Bollywood technique:” www.humanfactors.com/downloads/jun02.asp#bollywood

“The Hybrid User-Requirements Interface Evaluation (HURIE) Method,” Randolph Bias, Shannon Lucas, and Tammy Latham in User-Centered Design Case Studies, edited by Carol Righi and Janice James

“Guidelines for letting participants create their own tasks,” Whitney Quesenbery: www.wqusability.com/handouts/participant%20tasks.pdf

“Designing Web Sites for Older Adults: Expert Review of Usability for Older Adults at 50 Web Sites,” Ginny Redish and Dana Chisnell: http://assets.aarp.org/www.aarp.org_/articles/research/oww/AARP-50Sites.pdf

You can continue to collect stories during usability evaluations (or start doing so, if you are jumping into the middle of a process). These stories add more rich qualitative data to your understanding of users.

You can also use stories for usability tasks in several different ways: