User Testing with Invision

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:

• Invision is a cloud-based collaboration platform, used to create and manage wireframes and prototypes.
• Prototype testing is a process where you test your prototype with real users in order to validate design decisions before development starts
• There are 5 main benefits from user testing with Invision. They include: receiving feedback, saving time and money, failing fast, revealing opportunities and getting stakeholder buy-in
• To effectively test your Invision prototype, you’ll need to: create a shareable link, write a concise scenario and provide user test participants with specific tasks and follow-up questions
• Userbility offers an affordable pay-as-you-go pricing structure to afford user testing your prototypes more often

What is Invision?

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.

What is prototype user testing?

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?

What are the benefits of Invision user testing?

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.

Receiving invaluable user feedback

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.

Saving you time and money

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.

Fail-fast, fast-often

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.

Revealing undiscovered opportunities

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.

Getting stakeholder buy-in

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.

When should you start testing your Invision prototype?

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.

How do I know when my Invision prototype is ready for testing?

Here’s a simple checklist that can help you be a position, ready to test your prototype:

• Do you have a clear objective for testing your prototype?
• Do you know what you want to learn from your test?
• Are stakeholders aligned on the purpose for testing your prototype?
• If you have a test hypothesis, do you know what you’ll do next if it’s proven right or wrong?
• Optional: Do you have budget to conduct additional rounds of testing?

These questions have simple yes/no answers. The more yes’ you have, the closer you are to being in a position to test.

How to test your Invision prototype

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.

Generating an Invision share link

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.

1. Disable: Allow commenting on screens – this will disable the functionality for test participants from being able to comment on the prototype screens. Useful for internal and external stakeholders – irrelevant for test participants.
   
2. Enable: Hotspots – this will allow test participants to be tap/click through the prototype screens. Without it enable, the participants will be stuck on the first screen.
   
3. Disable: Prevent hotspot hitting – to minimise leading the test participants, disable prevent hotspot hitting. Hotspot hitting displays what is and isn’t tappable/clickable on the prototype screen. Showing this to participants could lead them to the correct answer and not be a true test.
   
4. Disable: Show inspect link and allow access to all screens – another distraction to remove, the inspect and allow access links are two buttons which show on the screens of the Invision prototype. Disable this feature to remove them before beginning your user test.

Creating your user test scenario

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:

• Callout to the test participants not everything will be working. This is primarily to set expectations and to ensure test participants don’t get to hung up on trying to get features to work when they’re not designed to.
  
• Provide information on how to escape. Participants can become lost within the sea of prototype screens. That’s why it’s important to specify in your scenario how the participant can reset themselves in the experience should they become lost e.g. If you become lost in the experience, tap the logo in the top left corner to start from homepage.
  
  

Setting tasks and asking questions

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.

Testing with your real users

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.

How to test your Invision prototype with Userbility

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:

1. Register your interest for the Userbility waitlist
   • If selected, you’ll be given the opportunity to create your first test
     
2. Create a test by giving it a name, a quick description and by selecting the device you want to test on e.g. mobile or desktop
   
3. Set-up screening questions for test participants to ensure you’re testing with your real users
   
4. With the test created and a pre-screener added, you can begin to define the starting URL and the scenarios, tasks and questions you’d like the test participants to follow and answer
   • Note: the starting URL for user testing with Invision will be the prototype share link
     
5. The final step is to preview and launch your study. Once the study has been launched, you’ll begin receiving feedback within 24hrs.

Wrap-up/Conclusion

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.