A Guide to Usability Testing Questions (Including 100 Examples)

YOU WANT UX RESEARCH SUCCESS? JUST ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS IN THE RIGHT WAY

Usability tests can be an integral step in understanding how a new feature or product works for your users. To make sure you get the most out of your research, it's important to understand what questions to ask to get those key insights.

Asking the right questions starts long before you’re “in the field”. It begins with defining your objectives, is the key to recruiting the right participants, and will determine if you get the answers you need from participants for an insightful and useful project. 

ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS TO DETERMINE YOUR RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

Clearly defining your objective—what business problem you want to inform and what you want to learn is the foundation to rewarding user research. Without clarity and specificity in your objectives, you won’t know what you’re looking for in participants or what questions to ask them. Start with these questions to help you define your objectives:

• What do you hope to learn from doing this research that you don’t already know?
• What do you already know, or think you already know in terms of what you want to learn?
• Why do you want to learn this? What business decisions do you want to be able to make–or actions do you want to take–when this research is complete? In other words, what do you want to DO with the insights and learnings from the research after you have them?

ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS TO FIND, QUALIFY, AND RECRUIT PARTICIPANTS

For UX Research, participant requirements are many and often very specific

The first step in recruiting the right participants for your research is defining the characteristics of an ideal participant. This depends on the topic or focus of your research. Some questions to ask might include:

Is the product, design, or feature that is the subject of the research:

• Targeted to your current audience or a smaller more specific demographic within your current audience or is it meant for a broader audience or an entirely new and different audience?
• Used mostly or solely by people in a specific industry or business?
• Used mostly or solely by people in a specific occupation?
• Used mostly or solely by people at a certain professional level?
• Used only in certain geographic areas or is it used differently in different geographic areas?

Additional questions to determine participants could include:

• What behaviors or habits do your participants need to be familiar with?
• What is the frequency and recency of the behavior or habits your participants need to be familiar with?
• How familiar do participants need to be or not be with the type of product, design, or feature you’re testing? 
• Do participants need to have a specific income level?
• What don’t you want in participants? Will experience in certain industries, positions or professional levels disqualify potential participants?
• Do participants need to be users or purchasing decision makers of certain products or features?

The answers to these questions will determine the questions you ask potential participants to qualify them for your research. 

The steps to a successful recruit:

The Screener Survey: You’ll want to use a survey as a first step to filter out the most unqualified participants. Keep it short enough to assure completion, but exhaustive enough to address the most important participant criteria. You can consider including a decoy question and response choice that will filter out unqualified participants. 

A survey may not give you enough information to determine the right participants. You may want to individually screen potential participants to make sure they fully qualify for specific behaviors or skill sets.

The Screener Interview: Screener questions should not be leading. They can be open-ended or multiple-choice. A mix of both can work well. With multiple-choice responses make sure not all answer choices qualify potential participants. 

Along with asking the questions to determine the behaviors and psychographics of your participants, you’ll want to make sure that participants are articulate and comfortable speaking about your research topic. Include one or two questions related to your study that will require a thoughtful, well-articulated response. Here are examples:

• Will you explain how you decided where to travel the last time you went on vacation? 
• Walk me through how you chose and purchased your last car.
• Will you tell me about the products you use daily to perform your job?

Where to Find Potential Participants

Now that you know what qualifies someone to be a participant, you’re likely asking yourself:

• Where will I find the right participants?

Great question and one that leads to a few more things to consider:

• Is the target audience solely your current audience?
• If the answer is yes then you can use your database to recruit.
• Is the target audience a combination of your current target audience and non-target audiences?
• Then you’ll need a second source of potential participants.
• Is the target audience professionals in specific fields and/or at specific professional levels?
• Your options include recruiting from professional social media sites like LinkedIn, professional associations, or working with a B2B recruiting platform. Some recruiting platforms like Respondent pre-qualify participants, make sure they have a valid work email, and offer extras like participant notification and incentive payment.

CONDUCTING YOUR RESEARCH: THE HOWS AND WHATS

Usability testing is a different kind of research

Show and Tell: When conducting a usability test, you will be asking participants to interact with a product, design, or feature. You then observe how they interact with it. But observation alone is not enough. You must ask questions that explore participants’ thoughts, strategies, and feelings as they interact with the product, design, or feature. 

“Free Play” vs. Assigned Tasks: Participants can interact with your product, design, or feature in three ways; 

1. Participants can independently explore and interact without direction or requests from you.
2. You can give participants direction, e.g., tasks to complete.
3. You can do a mix.

The focus of your research—both the product design or feature and what you hope to learn will determine which method to use. In most cases using a mix is recommended. Start your session with independent exploration and follow with assigned tasks.

It's not just what you ask but how you ask it: Ask This, Not That

How you phrase your questions can result in either honest or deceptive answers, rich and detailed responses, or short, uninformative responses. Use the chart below as a reference to help phrase questions that will elicit the responses you want.

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