Transform user goals into test scenarios : Open ended vs specific tasks
Scenario:
You just finished working on a project with your favourite client. Because the client is such a sweetheart, you decide to send a box of chocolate chip cookies to them! You have worked with them for four months and you know that the team just love these cookies from “Ben’s cookie” — So you need to order the largest box available and have to get them delivered as soon as possible!
Task:
Click open the “Ben’s cookie” app and place an order for a large box of chocolate chip cookies that has to be delivered on or before next Monday.
Honestly, there are no hard and fast rules for writing tasks, scenarios and questions for your usability test. But maybe that’s what makes the process all the more difficult. It’s absolutely crucial to get your users absorbed in your test scenario. If you fail to strike that connect, it’s difficult to derive insightful and useful data from the usability tests.
The opening scenario and task are very specific — which means there is one particular task that is assigned to the user. But, this is not how I always approach a test. Different tests demands different approaches. This article will talk about open ended vs specific task scenario — When to use which and how to do it perfectly.
Open ended tasks
As the name suggests, these are tasks that do not give out a lot of information about how to perform the task. Rather the idea is to watch users uncover the solution on their own.
An example,
Taking the opening scenario, an alternative way of assigning a task would be —
Scenario:
You just finished working on a project with your favourite client. Because the client was such a sweetheart, you decide to send a box of chocolate chip cookies to them! You have worked with them for four months and you know that the team just love these cookies from “Ben’s cookie”
Task:
“Click open the “Ben’s cookie” app and place an order for chocolate chip cookies”
Here as you observe, the researcher hasn’t provider the user with a lot of information. Rather he wants to observe what the user does on the app, what the factors that persuade his decision and so on..
When to use open ended scenarios?
The next obvious question would be how to decide when to use open ended scenarios against specific scenarios. So here’re the situations when I use this approach —
- Exploratory research — Open ended scenarios and tasks can help figure out the preferences of a user. If you have spread out options and need to prioritise few of them, open ended tasks might be the right choice.
- Find usability issues in the app/website — If you want to find out what is breaking the experience of your users in general, open ended testing helps. When the user freely explores the app, he/she often comes across usability issues which you might want to capture!
- Decide the line of business — I haven’t personally used open ended scenarios to decide the line of business, but I believe it’s an interesting use case of open ended testing. With multiple offerings, one needs to be sure which one would be projected in the lead. Knowing this in the early stage is always an added benefit.
How to totally nail it ;)
Choose a tool for user testing that allows you to feed in the task that has to shown to the user. For our research we use CanvasFlip.
When your user receives a request for the testing, he also gets a special note that tells him what he is supposed to do.
(The best part — you get all the UX insights related to each user in the same login ;) These insights include their individual videos, time taken on each screen, drop off ration etc)
Specific tasks
Specific scenarios and tasks give users the much needed details — clear guidance on what actions to perform and what features to explore. This focuses your research on the exact issues you’re interested in investigating.
Not just that, it’s always advisable to test individual flows before you test the entire prototype.
An example,
Scenario:
You just finished working on a project with your favourite client. Because the client is such a sweetheart, you decide to send a box of chocolate chip cookies to them! You have worked with them for four months and you know that the team just love these cookies from “Ben’s cookie” — So you need to order the largest box available and have to get them delivered as soon as possible!
Task:
Click open the “Ben’s cookie” app and place an order for a large box of chocolate chip cookies that has to be delivered on or before next Monday.
You have already gone through this set of scenario and task. Extra details such as which size to order and when should it be delivered, makes the research quite specific.
When to use specific scenarios and tasks?
Specific tasks are a must to deeply understand the issue with a part of the app/website. Here’re the situations when I use specific scenarios and tasks-
- Complex Products — If you have a complicated, non-traditional, or unusual product that people won’t automatically know how to use, specific tasks will guide them through it and explain the context.
- Test Specific Features — Give test participants specific instructions if you want to test the usability of a certain feature of your product. For example, “Please use the search bar to find a pair of women’s black jeans in size M.”
- Conversion Optimisation — If you know there’s a specific point in your conversion funnel where people are bouncing, use specific tasks and questions to watch them go through the funnel. This will give you the context and insights to understand why they’re bouncing.
How to use specific task based testing?
CanvasFlip already had the setup for sharing the prototype with a task and a scenario, but that was definitely not enough when designers and product managers wanted to perform specific task testing. What’s when we came up with task based testing.
With task based testing you can easily add as many tasks as you want, and all the UX analytics will be recorded task-wise. Here’s how you can do it using CanvasFlip.
(The best part — you get all the UX insights related to each user and the respective task in the same login ;) These insights include their individual videos, time taken on each screen, drop off ration etc)
This feature is already live in your CanvasFlip accounts. But, it’s now in BETA. So please accuse few bugs. Do let us know though. :) (monika@canvasflip.com)
Finally,
There are no universally “right” way of assigning tasks, so don’t be afraid to tweak scenarios and tasks for different methods (moderated vs. unmoderated) or different goals (findablity vs. checkout). With little prior brainstorming, picking between open ended vs specific is quite easy.
[TL;DR]
Open-ended tasks and questions help you learn how your users think. They can be useful when considering branding, content, and layouts, or any of the “intangibles” of the user experience. They’re also good for observing natural user behaviour.
Specific tasks and questions can help you pinpoint where users get confused or frustrated trying to do something specific on your site or app prototype. They’re great for getting users to focus on a particular feature, tool, or portion of the product they might not otherwise interact with.
