The Mom Test
April 3, 2009
I come from a music/audio background. When I was in college, we were taught the Car Test, being budding recordists. The Car Test, for those who are not familiar, is when you take the mix you did on a pair of speakers that are designed for critical listening and play it on the shittiest set of speakers you can find. (This might be the iPod Headphones Test or the Laptop Speakers Test, but I learned it as the Car Test.)
The purpose of this test is to hear your mix the way the average person might, and also to see how it sounds whehn it comes out of the acoustically optimized bubble you’ve been working in.
Now I’m building web applications and software. The current app that my company is working on needs to be simple and intuitive, except it’s being designed by guys who probably have a hugely different take on simplicity than the average person who will be using the site.
We needed a Car Test. We needed to see how the site would look to people, and we especially needed to make sure that it’d be so easy, my Mom could use it. And there it was:
The Mom Test.
My Mom is not a stupid person, by any measure. But she’s older than 30 and uncomfortable with computers in general. So we sent my Mom a still image of our layout and asked things like “what do you think this button does?” and “how would you ____ based on the stuff you see here?”
She passed with flying colors, as did 3 other Moms we asked.
The biggest problem with the Mom Test was that some moms did all they could not to asnwer the questions we asked, but rather make all the Mom-like observations about how this was spelled wrong, this pattern would look better if it was more French Country, etc.. We specifically said “focus only on the elements we ask about in the questions”, but some went way over the edge and forgot completely about the questions we asked.
I’ll keep using the Mom Test as we press on. I always hated the idea of software engineers testing software. I think the people who test software should be the people who are reomved the furthest from knowing about or designing software. They should be teachers and chefs. Just regular people with regular expectations.
