After having built your prototype, the next logical step is to test it and collect feedback from users. Yet, it only sounds easy. Traditional user testing requires quite some effort to find participants. Furthermore, even remote usability testing, despite its rising popularity, can take more time than expected.
In this blog post we will tell you about the results of a small trick we've used to see whether there are easier alternatives for the recruitment process of the usability testing participants.
How Publishing Prototypes on Landing Pages Can Help your UX Research?
If you have ever tried to conduct a user research, you know that finding participants can be daunting even if you are using tools like Maze to conduct unmoderated research.
We wondered if there was away to reverse the participant recruiting process. Imagine that instead of actively recruiting participants, you could have people test a prototype “passively”. Sounds efficient, right?
So, a couple of weeks ago, we decided to setup a quick experiment…
The Setup
The experiment setup was straightforward. We needed a prototype and a landing page that urges people to test the prototype. For the prototype we used a “dummy” pizza ordering app designed in Figma. After that, we ran the prototype through our platform and embedded the resulting web app on our commercial landing page. Finally, we activated the prototype’s analytics tracking and let the experiment run for a couple of weeks.
"Of Bots and Men"— Interactions on Our Landing Page
Over the course of these weeks over 5000 sessions were logged by the prototype’s analytics. Of course, a vast majority of these were bots and web crawlers. As a result, once filtered for actual prototype interactions, we identified 658 unique sessions of users interacting with our prototype.
The average user interacted (i.e. clicked on an element) 9 times with the prototype within a session. The average session lasted around a minute. Below you can see the distribution of interactions per session:
Can You really Draw Insights from Unmoderated, Passive User Tests?
Yes, you might not get exactly the same depth of insights as during a moderated, qualitative user interview. However, given the effort required by this method — basically none — we were able to observe interesting behaviour that could help steer follow-up research:
- On average users spent 46% of their time on a single screen which contained a functional Google Map showing their location.
- The screen accounting for the most interactions (20% on average) features a list of selectable options.
- Also, many users repeatedly selected various options to see how the sum total updated.
Usability Testing through Attracting Users Passively: Worth it or Not?
Summing up the results of our research, the method we used has been proven to be effective and reliable.
This way, if you are running short out of time and are to test your prototypes asap, you can definitely turn to this approach. What you need to do, is just to run the prototypes through our platform and put the output (a functioning web app) on your landing page.
Voilà, enjoy the organic traffic to your usability test and free data analytics of interaction with your prototype!
Looking to Run Your Figma Prototype on a Landing Page?
Weave.ly is a no-code prototyping and user research platform. It enables you to turn existing Figma designs into fully functional prototypes that automatically collect the usability data you need to support your user research and innovation efforts.Wondering how to use weave.ly in your next project? Try it out for yourself or have a chat with us.
