EFF’s design team routinely incorporates usability and user tests into its process when developing standalone websites and extensions. Often times, EFF's design team is short on resources to user test everything we want. If you're interested in supporting our team in user testing our extensions, we might be interested in collaborating — get in touch!.
The EFF design team has various methods for recruiting for and conducting user tests, depending on the project. These include:
- In-person: At conferences, trainings, libraries, or with staffers, friends, or family.
- Online: Userbrain, recruitment via social media and testing through video conferencing services.
If you want to contribute topic research to EFF (not design or user research), check out our Coding with EFF page where you can find the right way to get involved in a specific project.
EFF is a privacy organization, and we take the privacy of our user testing participants seriously. EFF is committed to protecting the privacy of visitors to our website, as well as our members and volunteers. In general, EFF uses the information provided by users to further its mission, including to protect privacy, defend freedom and innovation, and to protect users' rights in the digital world. Keep this in mind when conducting user tests of your own. Here are some tips:
- Do not collect user information if you don't need it for your specific purpose
- Be extra-careful when handling user's personal information such as name, phone number, location and device identifiers.
- Do not share this information with third parties.
- Make sure your research participants are properly informed about your project and that they consent to the information that will be shared with EFF.
For more information, please read EFF's privacy policy, as well as our Privacy Policy for our Software and Technology Projects.
If you're new to user testing, or even if you've done it before, this article by the Neilsen Norman Group is a good primer on what's often involved with user testing.
Good news! You don't need to set up some elaborate test in order to conduct research. You really only need a small number of users to effectively test products. This article by the Nielsen Norman Group tells you why.
Consider recruiting users at conferences, trainings, public events, or via social media. You can also use a service like Userbrain to find volunteers.
What are you trying to accomplish with your test? What specific features or flows are you testing? What insights do you hope to gain?
You may then need to figure out who may best fit your parameters for user tests, and for getting at the heart of your user research goals. You can create survey questions to determine eligibility—such as if you're looking for someone with a certain skill set, or using a particular type of device. You can distribute these surveys as a way to learn relevant information ahead of time for eligibility on user research, as well as manage scheduling for user tests.
After you identify the goal(s) of your user test, identify a specific task for your tester to carry out. Once you know the task, you can build a script for the test. Your script should:
- Thank the user
- Introduce yourself and the project
- Preview the task and what the user can expect
- Include the task(s) with a reminder to users that they should think aloud while carrying out the assigned task!
- Include both open-ended and Y/N questions
Here are some tips for writing a script and an example script for inspiration.
Depending on the size of your effort, you may want to delegate tasks to make it easier for yourself. Duties you will especially need to plan for include: greetings, facilitation and guiding users through the prompts, and notetaking. You may want to create a process for extensive notetaking and making observations based on the tests, as these are critical parts of the user research process.
Paper prototyping is a low barrier and fast way to get started with getting immediate feedback on a design. We like this method quite a bit for when we're in an early phase of a project.
It can be as simple as a few sketches of an interface. You can put the paper in front of a friend or tester and ask them how they might navigate through the service, while asking them to "think aloud".
If you have the means to provide a testing device (or your own, or their own, if they're comfortable), and to observe someone as they navigate through the flow of a service, you might gain some interesting observations. We've used this method for various projects, but if you're using this method, it's helpful to have specific use cases that you're testing for.
We either test with wireframes (which can be very simple or more high-fidelity, depending on the stage of the project), or an existing live project. We often don't have the capacity to make custom code to test out a feature, so we often prioritize conducting user tests with sketches or low-fidelity wireframes.
If you're interested in contributing user research, helping us to test with our existing live projects is often far more helpful to our team, given our limited capacity.
Ideally, you'll have a process in place for codifying notes, assessing feedback, and identifying themes and opportunities for design changes. This will need to be communicated clearly back to the developer and design teams. If the group agrees on a priority and teams have the capacity to do so, we will work on a production timeline for making changes.
This case study covers a year of internal user research and design strategy sessions with the goal of redesigning our Certbot website. Beyond securing the web, we hope this design case study will be helpful to other nonprofit organizations and independent groups who are also figuring out how to do smaller scale user research for their own technology projects.
- If you have a user testing research proposal, open an issue on the EFForg/design repo. You should hear back from our team within two weeks, at which point we'll let you know if and when we can move forward with collaborating with you on your proposal.
- Help us recruit user testers!
- User testing proposals for mobile on any of our extensions
- Accessibility-oriented user testing proposals
- A/B testing
- Very general tests or interviews (for example, on an entire browser extension)