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10.5 The process of user-based testing 283

User Night “officially” begins when a Yahoo is matched with a user.
Yahoo’s IT department provides all the equipment (e.g. smartphones or laptop
computers) when a user’s own device can’t be used—typically due to using
prerelease software that they’re not allowed to install on their own devices.
Yahoos conducting the session with the user are advised to mostly “watch and
listen” and note any feedback or suggestions users provide for improving the
product experience as they guide their assigned user through the script. This
makes up the bulk of the time spent at User Night and lasts approximately 1
hour. These interactions become so engaging it’s often difficult to bring the
night to a close, but the night must come to an end.
When the dust settles, and the users have left, the most critical part of User
Night takes place. All of the Yahoos remain to conduct a debriefing with the
UX researcher, accessibility specialist, and PM to discuss what was learned.
Commonly experienced issues and observations quickly rise to the surface, but
it is also important to capture the odd, curious and unusual observations, and
feedback as these provide opportunities for further investigation in the future.
A report recording, prioritizing, and analyzing all these findings is later created
and shared with the entire product team such that those who were not able to
participate in the User Night can also benefit from what was observed.
Yahoo’s User Night is a unique and innovative methodology to observe
and interact with a large number of users in a very short time period, gather
immediate, impactful feedback, and provide product groups with prioritized and
actionable improvements that can be used to make Yahoo products, services,
and technology more usable and accessible. It has proven to energize product
teams, encourage deeper consideration of end users during design, and result
in the delivery of improved products faster into market, with higher quality and
greater customer satisfaction.

THE GOOGLE RESEARCH VAN (WRITTEN BY LAURA GRANKA)

The research van is the newest method in Google’s User Experience (UX)
toolkit, aiming to overcome some limitations of traditional lab-based UX
research. We created the van to help improve Google’s user research studies
by enabling more participant diversity, agile recruiting, and flexibility when
planning and executing research.
At Google, we do much of our research in UX labs at our headquarters in
Mountain View, CA, and at our other major locations, like New York City, NY
and Seattle, WA. As with all methods, research in physical onsite labs has its
limitations, and in our case, we were growing increasingly concerned about
participant diversity—namely routinely doing research with people willing and
able to participate in our onsite research studies.
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