Blog Product Workshops What is a thinking aloud protocol and how can it improve your understanding of a product?What is a thinking aloud protocol and how can it improve your understanding of a product?
Can speaking your mind and thinking out loud lead to any business benefits? It turns out that it can. Let us tell you how we changed our approach to user testing and improved our partnership with a new product owner - all with a method called thinking aloud protocol. Read on to learn what it is and how we carried it out for one of our clients.
Table of contents
The think aloud protocol meaning
A thinking aloud protocol is a method of user testing in which participants work through the flow of a digital product while verbally describing what it is that they are doing and what they are expecting from each action. This way, the product team gets to see (and hear) their work through the perspective of complete strangers, and hopefully find ways to improve the UI and UX of their product.
In order for this method to be successful, there are a few things that need to happen. First, the participants have to be carefully selected. They need to represent the user group that we are looking to explore in terms of age, technological literacy, and/or ways of using the product. Then, each participant gets a specific task to complete, such as “order item X”, or “fill in form Y”. However, it’s up to them to find the way to do it. Watching each participant interact with the digital product gives the team useful insight into UI, UX, and the customer journey. Which is what we wanted to test for our client.
The client’s product and our thinking aloud protocol
Our client was a business owner from Saudi Arabia who wanted to simplify the formal process of opening a company in their country. Currently, it can only be done via paper forms and this would be the very first service introduced as part of the digitization of the process. While the idea seemed simple, there were some challenges with both the business and technical aspects of the product. And both of them could be addressed by a thinking aloud protocol.
Why did we decide to change our approach to user testing?
From the business perspective, there was the challenge of dealing with a recent change of product owner. We had worked with the previous one for six months and had a good understanding of what we wanted to achieve. The new PO, assigned by the client, was well prepared for their role but lacked the knowledge of the product that their predecessor had gathered during the project so far. And while this is to be expected when changing PO, it affected the way in which the work was progressing. How so? For example, our team and the new PO had different understandings of what each functionality was supposed to do.
There were also technical challenges, most of them related to user testing. Our team couldn’t clearly visualize what kind of user they were supposed to simulate in their tests. This was due to two reasons:
- no real users to perform tests with,
- the flow of the app was too complex.
These are problems that can be solved with a think aloud protocol usability testing. Instead of testing real users, participants could imitate the behavior of the users that we would like to test. But here’s a twist - instead of involving people from the outside as test subjects, we suggested that our PO could fill the role of test participant. This way, we would be able to share our in-depth knowledge of the product, while also getting a better understanding of how the new PO thinks.
How to plan and conduct thinking aloud testing?
We started off with a meeting on a group call, discussing what we need to successfully conduct the test. Our new PO agreed to prepare personas of the users that we would be testing. The team had to prepare an environment for thinking aloud testing - a clickable version of the product, capable of presenting the app’s flow.
The test itself took place in a group meeting where everyone involved in the product was present. We decided to include a facilitator to lead the PO through the process, while the rest of the team quietly observed and took notes. Our PO, while taking on different personas, was going through the app flow trying to complete the task from the scenario. At the same time, they were expected to say out loud what they were doing and what they were expecting to happen. After the test was over, the team could ask questions and give feedback on what they had heard.
What did we learn and how did it benefit the client?
The test revealed that the client intended to aim the product at multiple and specific personas that the team hadn’t been aware of. Also, the team learned more about the client’s business goals and users’ needs. That led to further benefits, such as:
- preparing new and improved QA test scenarios,
- fixing gaps in the UX of the product,fixing elements of the UI that were previously misunderstood,
- discussing all the “edge cases” which led to building a digital product that covered every possible user path.
None of these changes would have been implemented if the team’s knowledge of the business hadn’t expanded the way it did thanks to the thinking aloud method.
How to successfully implement a thinking aloud protocol?
Our experience taught us how to conduct a test in a way that benefits the product and the client. Instead of sticking only to our standard procedure, we learned a few things that were worth keeping in mind, such as:
- a test needs to be carefully planned (for that, we used a canvas with a user test scenario),
- it is useful to communicate upfront why the test is taking place and what value we expected to get out of it,
- finding someone to fill the three roles of meeting facilitator, secretary, and non-participating observer is important,
- the plan for the test and the summary of it needs to be written up as a report,
- there were certain words that were best avoided because of their potential negative associations (we replaced test and test subject with meeting and participant.)
These are only suggestions on how to make a thinking aloud protocol more beneficial. It’s worth remembering that every digital product is different and the fact that we found these tips useful doesn’t necessarily mean that every project would benefit in the same way.
Thinking aloud protocol - did we like it?
Overall, we found that using a thinking aloud protocol exceeded our expectations.It was intuitive, easy to implement, and solved every single one of our problems. At the same time, we are aware that there is always room for improvement. Having seen the positive effects on our partnership with the client, we are more than happy to do it again - hopefully as soon as possible.
Share this article:
