I've been running user testing sessions to validate designs throughout all of my roles.  I have experience of running different types of sessions, from eye tracking software, card sorting, mobile testing, paper prototypes, remote testing, down to more informal, small-scale studies.  Below are some examples of my work.

For this study with Deutsche Bank, I setup a remote testing environment as our participants were based in different parts of the world, so it was the only way to get any kind of controlled feedback.

It was an interesting study as we had two competing designs to put to the test, so I used an A/B test, with half the participants testing with each design.

Following the testing sessions, I held an Observations Analysis session where, as a team, we:

• Collected and clustered the observations and user feedback (negative and positive)
• Collated quantitive data to give the designs a score across different metrics
• Collected useful quotes from the users
• Collected feedback on new user needs or new features mentioned by the users
• Applied a severity rating to the issues and prioritised them with the product owners

The results showed a clear winner.  The design was successfully iterated and went on to be implemented, with outstanding fixes loaded into a backlog.

Firstly, I conducted an expert UX review to understand the issues myself and help form some hypotheses to drive the user testing.

I then recruited 10 participants (5x expert users and 5x novice) and got them to complete a series of tasks (to collect quantitive data) and asked a few questions to gain further insight into their usage and understanding of the app.