Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Chapter 32 The First Run Experience

When you’re doing a guerilla usability test (or any other kind of usability test), you’re giving your testers some context for what they’re doing. You’re giving them an introduction, you’re explaining tasks to them, and so on. You’re probably already setting up the application for them, so they don’t have to, say, set up their own Twitter accounts in our Twitter app. Regular users of your application don’t get that benefit. They’re thrown into the cold water head-first.

It’s worth thinking about what happens when they open your application for the first time. They have zero experience with your app and don’t ...