User Research Observations Board

There’s nothing we love more than watching user research as it happens live and discussing what we’re seeing with our client teams. Always an inspiring conversation to be had, full of lively debate and learnings that get captured on a flurry of post it notes.

With a round of remote usability testing scheduled to take place two days after the UK entered lockdown measures, we needed to think fast. We wanted to still be able to collaborate with our client team and build a shared understanding of the usability testing findings, without the luxury of being in the room with them.

That’s where Miro comes in. We designed this board to replicate a face-to-face observation workshop, where we would capture contextual information about our participants, along with the usability wins and barriers observed during the research. Not only did it give us and the client the chance to still share observations, the chat and video features allowed us to discuss them in the intervals, which kept some resemblance of normality.

With the board clearly divided up into participant by participant, task by task, it is easy to get a quick view on which participants had the most difficulties during the sessions, and which tasks had the most significant wins or losses. Particularly helpful for stakeholders that aren’t able to watch every session and are more likely to dip in and out during the day.

Whilst we’re excited about the idea of discussing user research with a client over a cuppa in the hopefully not too distant future, we’re glad to be able to build a shared understanding of research insight using this board and continue to collaborate with our clients. They think so too…

“I wanted to say a big thanks for making both yesterday and today work so well, it was great that we were still able to carry on with everything and get some great learnings out of the two days”.

(Amy Hill – Senior Digital Experience Architect at LV=)