Go to where your users are. If that’s a physical location, join them, observe, and ask questions. If online, send out a call for volunteers. nostr:npub1wmr34t36fy03m8hvgl96zl3znndyzyaqhwmwdtshwmtkg03fetaqhjg240 and team did this recently for nos.social.

When trying out new ideas, show them screenshots and ask them open ended questions like: “What do you notice about this screen?” “If you wanted to do X, how would you do it on this screen?”

Also great to have a basic workflow of a new feature that you want them to walk through. Give them the objective, but don’t tell them the exact buttons to click on. See how they go about doing it.

Biggest revelation: The obvious things to you are not obvious to them.

Yo! Some thoughts:

- Test early and often with real people

- source those who match your persona / who you’ve identified a problem to solve. UserTesting has been a good one, but you can find people anywhere as long as you know who you’re looking to help / learn from

- don’t sweat the conducting. Put your designers on the front lines and have them prepare a script / testing guide.

- have as many people across disciplines viewing the testing as possible. This will distribute new knowledge throughout your company

- take action by listening, iterating and getting your ideas into the hands of more people to ensure you’ve got a great experience.

- lastly, don’t be afraid to trust your intuition and instincts. Test to ensure comprehension and validate your hunches, but don’t let the testing be your only source of truth. Let your gut guide.

Test in production 😅

If you want to test a specific flow provide the task, don’t provide further instruction, and observe and take notew silently in pain until you get it right.

Designer and product/customer person should be there.

If resource constrained startup does not have dedicated folk in these roles, make sure the front end dev is there.