Summary
It is more important than ever to understand your audience to succeed but it takes rigor to gain valuable insights. Learn how framing usability test scenarios with distractions and interruptions lead to a deeper line of questioning and exponentially increases the accuracy of your user research. Join Marc Majers & Tony Turner, the user experience team from the book Make Your Customers Dance, to discuss techniques that will make a big impact on your product's competitiveness.
Key Insights
-
•
Traditional UX testing generally plans for perfect, uninterrupted user paths, ignoring realistic distractions.
-
•
Interrupted user experience involves deliberately adding real-life interruptions such as phone calls or connectivity issues into usability testing.
-
•
Building interruptions into tests increases participant immersion and yields richer, more realistic data.
-
•
The three-step interrupted UX methodology consists of investigate, separate, and frame.
-
•
Observing the actual context and user goals is critical to identifying relevant interruptions for testing.
-
•
Interruption timing should follow a story curve—inserting disruptions at mid-flow maximizes realism and insight.
-
•
Prototype fidelity affects how effectively interruptions can be tested; higher fidelity enables more impactful disruptions.
-
•
Ethical considerations include informing participants about potential stress without ruining test authenticity and managing emotional responses carefully.
-
•
Interruptions reveal hidden usability issues, such as the need for auto-save functionality.
-
•
Interrupted UX should be used supplementally during key product stages to balance complexity and benefit.
Notable Quotes
"We typically design for the perfect path. Do you design and plan and test for the unexpected path?"
"Generally everyone is just cutting right through because that’s the fastest route."
"Building in interruptions exponentially increases the accuracy of the findings."
"You want to separate out those distractions from the actual tasks."
"Interruptions get participants more immersed and lead to higher quality discoveries."
"If you begin to add interruption, you’ll see a big difference in what comes out of that study."
"The customer’s mental model is a bit different than your mental model and also different than the actual product."
"You want to let participants know it’s a bit non-typical and they are not being tricked or evaluated."
"The timing is key—you want to interrupt them when they are in that flow state."
"Interruptions reveal things like auto-save that you never thought about before."
Dig deeper—ask the Rosenbot:
More Videos
"Designers adhere to standards not scientific ones, but design rigor tailored to dealing with complexity."
Yoel SumitroActions and Reflections: Bridging the Skills Gap among Researchers
March 9, 2022
"When we protect our rest, we also protect our dreaming."
Zariah CameronReDesigning Wellbeing for Equitable Care in the Workplace
September 23, 2024
"Disruptive change is the new normal, coming from every direction — not just technology."
Doug PowellDesignOps and the Next Frontier: Leading Through Unpredictable Change
September 11, 2025
"If you’re generating buy-in, don’t forget what it will mean for your difficult stakeholders—they may have external pressures you don’t know about."
Darian DavisLessons from a Toxic Work Relationship
January 8, 2024
"I helped a company save 12 million dollars by not investing in an iris scanner in a one-week project."
Mike OrenWhy Pharmaceutical's Research Model Should Replace Design Thinking
March 28, 2023
"It’s not about giving up power, it’s about gaining authority through partnership and trust."
Jacqui FreyScale is Social Work
March 19, 2020
"The V2MOM stands for Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures and is a framework every Salesforce employee uses."
Kim Holt Emma Wylds Pearl Koppenhaver Maisee XiongA Salesforce Panel Discussion on Values-Driven DesignOps
September 8, 2022
"When we design for the edges, we get the middle for free."
Samuel ProulxFrom Standards to Innovation: Why Inclusive Design Wins
September 10, 2025
"We wanted to be aware of extraversion, so words like energy were changed to initiative to not favor personality types."
Laine Riley ProkayHow DesignOps can Drive Inclusive Career Ladders for All
September 30, 2021
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What strategies help transform accessibility compliance from a burden to a competitive advantage?
What does an effective omni operations model look like balancing standardized processes with domain flexibility?
What role does storytelling at project milestones play in communicating design work to leadership in the federal government?