97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 92. Improve Usability Testing with Task Cards

Todd Zazelenchuk

Sometimes the smallest detail can make a process work better. Remove a pebble from your shoe to make a long hike more comfortable. Add a drop of oil to a bicycle chain to smooth out your ride. In our field of UX design and research, incorporating task cards into our usability studies provides a small but powerful boost to improve study execution and quality.

Task cards are a simple concept: they are individual cards that display the printed task for the study participant to read. They are printed on paper for in-person studies or presented on-screen for online usability sessions. Asking participants to read tasks out loud, rather than the researcher reading them, has several advantages:

• Task cards empower participants during a usability study. Participants must contend with many variables when researchers deliver tasks verbally, including the speaker’s volume level, enunciation, pace of delivery, and occasional accent. In addition, the participant must deal with their own short-term memory limitations in remembering task details. When researchers use task cards in their studies, it is not uncommon to see participants reference them multiple times while performing a task, particularly when tasks are complex.

• After participants have read the task (preferably aloud), the researcher can ask them to paraphrase ...