Setting Usability Milestone Goals

As we were building one our new products and planning out how our usability testing would align with project managements's development milestones, I found it to be useful to create usability goals that would live in parallel to our development path. As development work neared completion towards the end of a milestone, I created usability goals for the chunk of work done. These usability goalswould be key points of observation during client research, and if we established that enough goals were not met then the associated Milestone would not be considered a success. Laying out goals at the beginning helps people have a common understanding of your usability standards for your product.

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As an example, for our Forms product I laid out the following usability goals for our first project milestone:

• It is clear which fields are required
• It is obvious when a field is invalid and easy to correct it
• User fills out form without any errors/vals thrown (it is clear enough that there are no mistakes)
• The donation amount is easy for them to find, select, fill out
• Form labels, section names, iconography are correctly understood
• All fields are easily filled out, with minimal hesitation and no questions
• The footer contains information donors find useful
• The “Review” modal displays the correct amount of info for submission confidence
• Donor can accurately predict what will happen after form submission
• The “Confirmation” page displays correct amount of info to convey accuracy, and reinforce emotional message of contributing to org’s mission
• The “Confirmation” page is expected end state of form user flow
• Client expresses confidence in sharing form with their donorbase. Donor expresses confidence in sharing with other potential donors.
• Form complies with WCAG accessibility standards

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Once you have your goals written out and shared with your stakeholders and testing team, you can keep them in mind as you are crafting your usability test scenarios and tasks. Your note takers and other testers can help comment on their observations on each of your goals, either during the test or afterwards as they are collecting their thoughts. Each goal can get a "pass", "fail", or "needs followup" grade - personally I liked using emojis to make it more fun and easy to scan 🔬�

To see an example of my Testing Results report that includes these goals, view this google doc that is a copy of an earlier one I created this year. It also includes other information we gathered from our sessions that I typically include at the end of research: Client Wishlists (things they asked for), Things to Investigate (questions we had that needed follow-up on), and Recommendations (Changed recommended by the testing group). In the example doc I linked, the product manager also reviewed the doc and prioritized our recommendations based on their own assessment.

Having goals and an easily scannable report at the end of your research time box helps greatly in getting people on-board with iterations that address usability concerns. Showing clear, simple grades of "pass" or "fail" (emoji or otherwise) makes it easier for people to skim and absorb on their lunch breaks. If you have tried writing up extensive research reports before, you know it can be challenging to get non-UX people to read them. I've found that the simpler I make them, the more widely they are read and referred back to.

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