Why get feedback?
You want to get feedback from your team members, reviewers, people whose opinion you trust, potential investors, because you want to build the best prototype (through refinement) and eventually the best product possible.
Perhaps most importantly you need to get feedback from real users to make sure that your prototype achieves its goals. You need to validate your ideas and that can only be done by getting feedback on your prototype.
Getting feedback on your Proto.io project
You can get valuable feedback on your Proto.io project by:
- Exchanging editors comments and annotations with other designers who have edit rights on the particular project. Editors comments can be posted in Player, by turning the relevant switch on.
- Asking users to review it (via a Share link, opened in a web browser or the Proto.io app) and give comments. To receive comments, make sure you have the "Enable comments" option on (from the Share modal). Learn more here.
- Inviting users to review it through the Proto.io app.
- Planning and conducting user testing sessions, in which users invited by you or chosen from a panel are given a set of tasks to complete on your prototype and respond to survey questions. Their sessions, as well as their responses, are recorded for you to analyze (via UserTesting, Valitately and Userlytics).
The decision depends on factors such as the fidelity of your prototype, the type of feedback you are looking for, the availability of reviewers, your resources, etc.
Proto.io works closely with specialized user research and usability testing platforms, such as UserTesting, Validately, and Userlytics, to ensure you get the most valuable feedback for your Proto.io prototypes.
What is moderated and unmoderated user testing?
The two main categories when it comes to user testing are:
- Moderated, when a moderator (a person) is present to guide the test (degree of involvement varies)
- Unmoderated, when there is no moderator and the user does the test on his/her own from start to end.
The output of both can be screen and audio recordings and sometimes face video.
In unmoderated, users just do what they are asked and will hopefully understand and carry out their tasks. You (the evaluator) cannot ask anything, or give any hints, or get involved in any way. So tasks have to be very carefully prepared/written (perhaps more than in moderated).
'Unmoderated' is easier to set up and you can get a lot more tests done. There are no time zone or personal (your) availability restrictions, getting in the way. You can ask the users to think aloud and express verbally what they do.
In 'moderated' you need more preparation in general and you need a moderator with people skills, knowledge of the product and what you're looking for in the test (right questions for the right feedback). Sometimes having a moderator present might make the user interaction ‘not’ natural.
Another important decision is who to recruit? Users you picked yourself, or from a panel of users offered by the research or testing tool? You need to make sure you test with users from your target audience, or else you risk your results not being objective.
Given the above, we frequently see 'moderated' being more useful when you're in an earlier stage of the design process when you are still exploring and need to get qualitative feedback from your test users. Especially when you have a low-fidelity prototype to test, you want to discover as much as you can and sometimes even things you never thought of.
The closer you get to a prototype that 'feels real', the more it makes sense to test 'unmoderated'.