You’ve spent hours perfecting your prototype in InVision. You feel it’s ready to be pushed into development.
But how do you know it’s not riddled with usability problems?
Luckily there’s a solution: remote user testing.
User testing with Invision can be tricky. Luckily, this guide is here to show you how to do it right.
Let’s dive in!
TLDR:
It’s important to differentiate that Invision is 2 different products. There is InvisionApp: a cloud-based, visual collaboration platform that helps professionals to create and manage wireframes and prototypes.
There is also Invision Studio: a more powerful version of InvisionApp, more focused on high-fidelity designs, which provides additional features and functionality, such as: supporting more file types, advanced billing, custom branding
For the sake of this post, we’re going to be focusing on prototype testing with InvisionApp.
Prototype testing is a process whereby you test your prototype with real users in order to validate design decisions before development starts. The goal is to identify problems and areas of improvement early so they can be addressed prior to development, resulting in a product that meets users’ needs and expectations.
Because we’re looking at user testing an Invision prototype, it’s important to call out that prototype user testing is different from prototype usability testing.
Prototype user testing tries to answer the question: do people need my app? Whereas, prototype usability testing tries to answer the question: can people use my app?
There are numerous benefits of testing your prototype before developments starts, which can include, receiving unbiased feedback, revealing undiscovered opportunities and achieving early discover of design problems.
We’ll explore the top 5 benefits of user testing your Invision prototype.
The importance of receiving feedback during the prototyping stage cannot be understated. User testing allows you to make necessary changes to your product early on, ensuring a final product that users will love.
With the observations and insights you gather from your test participants, you can make any necessary improvements to your prototype and in turn UX, before development begins.
Early detection of problems within the prototype can prevent problems later on in the development process, limiting waste in both time and money (time = money). Likewise, imagine not testing your prototype before it goes live? The time and cost to undo a development change is significantly higher than changing a design early on.
Similar to saving you time and money, failing fast and failing often in the prototyping stage is not going to cost the business as much as failing when delivering new experiences to production. The prototyping stage is the ideal place to commit to failing fast, and failing often. Fail fast, fail often – receive feedback, learn from it and make the necessary changes before committing to development.
Note: with Userbility’s low cost pay-as-you-go structure, you’re able to afford more to fail-fast, and fail-often.
Gathering the insights for what works and what doesn’t within your prototype, allows you to discover new opportunities. The back and forth nature of failing fast, failing often and the ongoing conversation between design and prototyping, create an iterative process. The iterative process allows you explore and experiment, either incremental changes or radical ideas, exploring new possibilities.
By user testing your Invision prototypes, you’re gathering quantitative and qualitative data for what works and what doesn’t. There’s nothing more powerful than being able to tell a compelling story to your stakeholders about customer problems, supported with data. Likewise, you can use prototypes to sell new ideas and to motivate and inspire stakeholders on radical new ways of thinking.
Testing your Invision prototype can save you time and money, reveal undiscovered opportunities and even achieve getting stakeholder buy-in.
So, when should you start testing your Invision prototype?
There’s no definitive answer on when you should start testing your prototype, apart from saying, ‘as soon as possible and as often as possible.
Here’s a simple checklist that can help you be a position, ready to test your prototype:
These questions have simple yes/no answers. The more yes’ you have, the closer you are to being in a position to test.
You’ve answered the questions above and you’re hitting all yes’. It’s now time to start testing!
But how do test your Invision prototype?
There are few steps to follow to get up and running.
To begin user testing your Invision prototype, you’ll need to generate a share link. The share link is used for Userbility participants to access the prototype throughout the user test.
To generate a share link, open up Invision and click the “Share” button in the top right of your dashboard.
This will display a modal with settings for generating the share link. You’ll want to click on “More Options” to ensure all the settings are displayed, as there are a few best practices for setting up the share link.
With your Invision share link in hand, you’re ready to write your user testing script.
When testing a prototype, all great user testing scripts begin with a concise scenario that set the user up success, but allowing to be in the right mindset.
To write a great introductory scenario, here are some tips to follow:
Following on from a concise, but thorough scenario, provide tasks and follow-up questions for the participants to complete and answer.
Tasks can fall into two categories: broad or specific. A task being broad or specific depends on the objective of your user testing. For example, if you’re testing mega menu findability, then you’d want a specific task calling out to use the mega menu. If you’re more interested in general findability, then you’d keep the task broad e.g. Using the website, find X product.
Questions should be kept open-ended. The reason for this is we don’t want to lead the witness. We want genuine feedback on how the participant thinks and feels about the experience.
With a constructed user testing script, you can screen a user testing panel for your real users.
Whilst screening for demographics is a good place, they don’t find your real users. At Userbility, we allow everyone to screen for their real users by filtering for psychographics and online/offline behaviours.
This ensures the participants demonstrate like-for-like attributes to the people who use your app, product or website.
Even though testing your InVision prototype can be daunting, you’ve learn the basics on how to test your prototype. It’s time to put these learnings into practice by creating a user test with Userbility:
The next time you’re working on an Invision prototype and looking for new ways of improving, try user testing. User testing your Invision prototype will save you time and money, get stakeholder buy-in and reveal opportunities before the development process.
Starting user testing your Invision prototype today with Userbility.