The team assigned you a great new concept, one that could really position your company where it should be. Everyone is excited until someone mentions the ugly R-word. That word, of course, is research and not everyone will understand it’s importance. Some will even incorrectly believe that it could be completely done away with.
Research gives us the ability to create a design that will work in reality. It can tell us what our clients actually think and how they will react behaviorally in different scenarios. It gives us the ability to see the rich differences between intention and reality.
Research can turn our assumptions of what is right into the truth of what is wrong. It gives us direction and shortens our guessing time. It gives us data over time lost speculating. Research done correctly can even change our opinions.
Image source: Daniel Bogoradov
Still, time is money and research are seen as very time extensive and not worth all of the time lost. Truthfully research has been known to take weeks or even months to complete correctly. This is a real and costly loss of profit. Maybe, says the team leader, it will be cheaper to fix issues post-production?
Everyone may agree but no one is talking about how and when design flaws are to be corrected. That behavior could end a project before it truly gets started.
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The Benefits of Guerilla Testing
In many UX circles, there are two recognized forms of research. First is the formal research we are all familiar with and then there is UX guerilla testing. Formal research has benefited over the years by having been studied by many individuals and groups. This is not true for guerilla user testing and it has fewer guidelines to direct the researcher.
Despite the fact that many UX purists frown on this form of testing it has become more common for the UX practitioner. This is due to struggles with ever-tightening budgets and project deadlines. Gorilla testing can fast-track testing phases as well as the research phase. Some UX practitioners have begun to call it the art of Gorilla testing for just that reason.
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This type of testing can be described as user testing in a simple, short and relatively agile manner. It doesn’t mean that the testing is unplanned, unstructured or undocumented. What the formal tester tries to avoid by not conducting any research or testing can often lead to expensive and untimely design changes that don’t benefit the user in any way.
What Needs To Be Asked Before Starting
People who have used this type of testing in the past and are sold on it. These people have seen first-hand how unique and helpful Gurella testing can be. Still, there are some questions that have to be settled before the testing can be done.
- What shall we test?
- Where will we test?
- With whom shall we test?
- How will we test?
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Characteristics of Guerilla User Testing
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Guerilla testing UX is characteristically different from traditional testing through three of its characteristics. These are rigor, time and cost. It’s very important to understand that you won’t get the same rigor results that you might in more traditional testing. You will likely get just enough to determine a problem or opportunity improvements.
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“Just enough rigor” can be difficult to conceive of without the context of the audience that makes up your user base. The truth is that Guerilla recruitment methods don’t often benefit from multiple rounds of qualified candidate filters. Instead, the users may be simply a group that was available at the right time. Ideally, though all candidates will fall into the middle area of known user types.
Time and effort are the biggest factors that your client or project sponsor will be concerned with. Deadlines are just that deadlines. Everyone has them. The guerilla method can help you to keep those deadlines without derailing the whole project.
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No matter whether a usability test is to be done in a workplace, school or even home setting up and preparing for the test can take a lot longer than does the test. It can present a challenge to schedule, travel, set up, getting clearance paperwork ready and one hundred other small things will run up the cost of a test before the test evens begins.
The guerrilla approach to usability-testing is remote. Remote testing can remove many of the time costing activities of traditional testing. It shaves off time and effort. However, this savings can have trade-offs. These trade-offs are usually of the “it’s better to have some reliable data than none” variety.
What’s Guerilla User Testing To You?
Image source: Zoe Kulsariyeva
Before implementing any type of user testing you should consider just what it would mean for yourself. Is guerilla usability test going to help you in the long run? Would you be better off trying for a more traditional means of research or even none? Not all organizations are going to need a research and testing framework document to formalize and standardize the process.
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If you do think that guerilla testing may be a useful option you will need to make sure that the data you extract is reliable and consistent. This may mean spending time on deciding what factors the user environments can have on a user. Does weather have any chance of corrupting data, will the time of day its tested matter? Remember to keep test items simple and with a focus on the answers you need to do the best job you can.
Credit for featured image: Philip Clark
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