See also: Guerilla User Testing, Remote User Testing
Difficulty: Easy
Evidence strength
Relevant metrics: Jobs to be done ranking, Ranking needs, wants, desires, pains, Observations & stories
Validates: Feasibility, Desirability
How: Step in the shoes of your users by experiencing similar scenarios. Wear, tear, and use physical prototypes as you would the final product or use your digital prototype for the same tasks and with the same data reliving real user scenarios and contextual activities around the product as actual users would.
Why: Trying out your own product or prototype in real-life scenarios and with real data can reveal critical assumptions, prerequisites, and design flaws and help you understand social and emotional implications of your design. It prompts appreciation of the experience actual users might have.
This experiment is part of the Validation Patterns printed card deck
A collection of 60 product experiments that will validate your idea in a matter of days, not months. They are regularly used by product builders at companies like Google, Facebook, Dropbox, and Amazon.
Get your deck!Before the experiment
The first thing to do when planning any kind of test or experiment, is to figure out what you want to test. To make critical assumptions explicit, fill out an experiment sheet as you prepare your test. We created a sample sheet for you to get started. Download the Experiment Sheet.
The “Try it Yourself” experiment is a hands-on approach involving using the product or prototype directly to understand its appeal and effectiveness from the user’s perspective.
After the experiment
To make sure you move forward, it is a good idea to systematically record your the insights you learned and what actions or decisions follow. We created a sample Learning Sheet, that will help you capture insights in the process of turning your product ideas successful. Download the Learning Sheet.
Examples
Medical device
Wearing a prototype medical device throughout daily activities can help you understand physical, social, and emotional implications for patients who might use it.
Basecamp
The product team at the project management platform, Basecamp, are known for developing their product to fit their own needs of project management and thereby solving the needs of similar others.
GitHub
GitHub, originally an internal tool for developers, evolved into a major code hosting platform. This “Try it Yourself” experiment exemplifies creating a solution for one’s own problem, then scaling it to meet similar needs in the wider market.
This experiment is part of the Validation Patterns printed card deck
A collection of 60 product experiments that will validate your idea in a matter of days, not months. They are regularly used by product builders at companies like Google, Facebook, Dropbox, and Amazon.
Get your deck!Related plays
- IDEO Method cards by IDEO
