Asking participants to “pretend” in user studies
Categorised under: Usability & user-centered design
Jared Spool has written about the dangers of getting users to pretend during usability testing. To quote:
One of the places we kept noticing this was when we watching people shop online. Asking a shopper to pretend to purchase (“Could you find a pair of shoes you might like to buy and put it in your cart?”) produced extremely different behaviors than when we recruited people who needed the product and gave them the cash to make a real purchase. In the former case, they went through motions and skipped steps that we didn’t see when they were considering and purchasing the product for their own true use.
Tags: usability, usability testing, user research
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 