Book Review: "The Mom Test: A Review For UX Designers"

I am currently taking the Diploma in UX Design from the UX Design Institute, and loving every minute of it! As with any quality and accredited course, we have readings to do, and I decided that I'd save my notes here. If you find this post, and you are looking for a short review of "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick from a UX design perspective, I hope you find this helpful.

"The Mom Test" is a short book, easy to read, written by a start-up veteran (Rob Fitzpatrick), who shares his insights on making meetings matter, ie. the key questions to ask in meetings that will give actionable insights rather than just 'that went well'. He comes at it very much from a start-up founder perspective and there's a lot of good stuff about failing fast, etc.

I was reading it from the point of view of a UX Designer and the kind of questions we need to ask when carrying out user tests.

When preparing for user testing, we would have questions prepared in advance. Where The Mom Test helps is in what those questions should be. Essentially, what you want is to drill down on what their experience has been in relation to the problem you are trying to solve. Not pitching the solution!

The Mom Test Questions

• Get them to talk about their life or the aspect of it that is relevant for the test (not your thing that solves their problem!)
• Go deep - get specifics off them and their opinions (not yours!)
• Talk less and listen more. (I will personally take note on that one!)

Keep the conversation on track and ignore compliments - especially, I would add, if you're testing with an Irish audience. Irish people love to please and just because they tell you something is good, doesn't mean they will buy it! ??

On the drilling down aspect, if they bring something up, rather than noting it down and taking it as a real problem that needs to be solved by additional features, etc. Try and discover if this is a real problem. To do this you can ask questions like:

• How seriously does this affect you?
• Does this affect the price / the bottom line
• How much time do you spend on this problem each week?
• Do you have any ideas for it?
• What tools do you already use to solve it?
• What ways are you trying to fix it?
• What are 3 big things you need to fix right now? (see if they mention this thing)

Avoid Fluff

When someone tells you that they 'always' do something, or they 'might' drill down, find out more. Get the facts! You could respond with questions like:

• Do you ever...
• Would you ever...
• Do you think you...
• Could you see yourself...

Feature requests should be explored, but not obeyed! The last thing you want to do from user testing is come back with a whole set of additional requests.

Questions to Dig Into Feature Requests

• Why do you want that?
• What would you do with that?
• How are you coping without it?

Overall I enjoyed this book. As a first read on my course, it was an easy one. Looking forward to the next one which is Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" a classic!