Interrupted UX - Add A Dose of Reality To Usability Testing
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
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Traditional UX testing generally plans for perfect, uninterrupted user paths, ignoring realistic distractions.
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Interrupted user experience involves deliberately adding real-life interruptions such as phone calls or connectivity issues into usability testing.
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Building interruptions into tests increases participant immersion and yields richer, more realistic data.
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The three-step interrupted UX methodology consists of investigate, separate, and frame.
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Observing the actual context and user goals is critical to identifying relevant interruptions for testing.
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Interruption timing should follow a story curve—inserting disruptions at mid-flow maximizes realism and insight.
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Prototype fidelity affects how effectively interruptions can be tested; higher fidelity enables more impactful disruptions.
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Ethical considerations include informing participants about potential stress without ruining test authenticity and managing emotional responses carefully.
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Interruptions reveal hidden usability issues, such as the need for auto-save functionality.
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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."
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