Answer:

So you have decided to CONDUCT a usability test for your product —so as to understand your product from the users’ perspective. You then realize that you have to come up with relevant questions to ask participants.

“That sounds like a piece of cake,” some may presume.

Writing effective usability questions seems deceptively easy, but the HARSH reality is it’s not as simple as you may think it is. There are QUITE a number of mistakes to avoid.

How you phrase your questions will directly impact the quality and value of your user testing results. Ask your participants wrong questions, or use the wrong words to STRUCTURE the questions, and you will gather incorrect feedback. Wrong questions can contaminate the whole research —leading to misleading insights.

Before you come up with any usability questions, there is a great need to think of what you intend to learn from the test. Begin by asking yourself this: what information do I need from this research?

Taking time to answer that QUESTION will help you narrow down all the possible wrong directions you might head before getting to the insights you need. The ultimate goal could be as simple as finding out if users will click on your search result listing.

When you have a clearly defined goal, writing usability questions isn’t a task hard to do. By default, your usability questions can either be open-ended or closed-ended.

Whenever we conduct any user research, at Invesp, our conversations with our participants have a natural rhythm. We ensure this by using open-ended and closed-ended questions in unison. This article will explore open and closed-ended questions in great detail, focusing on how to write them and when to use them.