Interrupted UX - Add A Dose of Reality To Usability Testing
Summary
It is more important than ever to understand your audience to succeed but it takes rigor to gain valuable insights. Learn how framing usability test scenarios with distractions and interruptions lead to a deeper line of questioning and exponentially increases the accuracy of your user research. Join Marc Majers & Tony Turner, the user experience team from the book Make Your Customers Dance, to discuss techniques that will make a big impact on your product's competitiveness.
Key Insights
-
•
Traditional UX testing generally plans for perfect, uninterrupted user paths, ignoring realistic distractions.
-
•
Interrupted user experience involves deliberately adding real-life interruptions such as phone calls or connectivity issues into usability testing.
-
•
Building interruptions into tests increases participant immersion and yields richer, more realistic data.
-
•
The three-step interrupted UX methodology consists of investigate, separate, and frame.
-
•
Observing the actual context and user goals is critical to identifying relevant interruptions for testing.
-
•
Interruption timing should follow a story curve—inserting disruptions at mid-flow maximizes realism and insight.
-
•
Prototype fidelity affects how effectively interruptions can be tested; higher fidelity enables more impactful disruptions.
-
•
Ethical considerations include informing participants about potential stress without ruining test authenticity and managing emotional responses carefully.
-
•
Interruptions reveal hidden usability issues, such as the need for auto-save functionality.
-
•
Interrupted UX should be used supplementally during key product stages to balance complexity and benefit.
Notable Quotes
"We typically design for the perfect path. Do you design and plan and test for the unexpected path?"
"Generally everyone is just cutting right through because that’s the fastest route."
"Building in interruptions exponentially increases the accuracy of the findings."
"You want to separate out those distractions from the actual tasks."
"Interruptions get participants more immersed and lead to higher quality discoveries."
"If you begin to add interruption, you’ll see a big difference in what comes out of that study."
"The customer’s mental model is a bit different than your mental model and also different than the actual product."
"You want to let participants know it’s a bit non-typical and they are not being tricked or evaluated."
"The timing is key—you want to interrupt them when they are in that flow state."
"Interruptions reveal things like auto-save that you never thought about before."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"If a dialog pops up but the keyboard focus isn’t moved into it, a screen reader user might not know it’s there."
Sam ProulxEverything You Ever Wanted to Know About Screen Readers
June 11, 2021
"You can access the digital swag bag by scanning the QR code or visiting fld.me/cd2022 for cool sponsor offers."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
November 17, 2022
"You do not have to go publicly thank the employer who just laid you off. They’ll be fine without it."
Corey Nelson Amy SanteeLayoffs
November 15, 2022
"Edgy is like a Rosetta Stone for enterprises, expressing the same thing in languages designers, strategists, and architects use."
Milan GuentherA Shared Language for Co-Creating Ambitious Endeavours
June 6, 2023
"Stakeholders aren’t ready to write their own briefs or manage recruitment, so it ended up being a hybrid model initially."
Erin May Roberta Dombrowski Laura Oxenfeld Brooke HintonDistributed, Democratized, Decentralized: Finding a Research Model to Support Your Org
March 10, 2022
"When blind users choose between Android and iPhone, they weigh trade-offs between stability and customizability."
Sam ProulxUnderstanding Screen Readers on Mobile: How And Why to Learn from Native Users
June 6, 2023
"Our AI-supported mornings were no longer about just dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s, but deeper analysis sessions including clients."
Mujtaba HameedThe new horizon of ethnography: using AI to unlock the full potential of in-person research
March 11, 2026
"In our information civilization, the information space that people assume to be public is actually ruled by private commercial interests for maximum profit."
Ilana LipsettAnticipating Risk, Regulating Tech: A Playbook for Ethical Technology Governance
December 10, 2021
"When we design for the edges, we get the middle for free."
Samuel ProulxFrom Standards to Innovation: Why Inclusive Design Wins
September 10, 2025
