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Checklist

Ecological validity checklist for user research

Eight checks to make a study's conditions closer to real use

Checklist of eight ways to raise ecological validity in a user research study, from recruiting real users to noting artificial conditions in the report
Run it on your study plan before recruiting, and be honest about which boxes you left unticked

An eight-point checklist for making user research conditions closer to real life: who you recruit, which device and data they use, when and where the session happens, how tasks are framed, how observed people feel, and how you report what was artificial. Use it when planning interviews or usability tests whose findings need to hold up in real use. Koji helps by letting people answer self-paced interviews on their own device, close to the moment the experience happened.

Where this appears

What's in this checklist

  • Recruit people who do the task for real
  • Use their device, account and data
  • Ask about a specific recent time
  • Meet them where and when the task happens
  • Write tasks as goals from their week
  • Reduce the feeling of being watched
  • Compare what they said with what they did
  • Report the artificial parts

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Free to use in your docs, decks and posts under CC BY 4.0, as long as you credit Koji with a link to this page. To embed it, paste this into your page:

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<a href="https://www.koji.so/visuals/ecological-validity-research-checklist"><img src="https://www.koji.so/visuals/ecological-validity-research-checklist/ecological-validity-research-checklist.png" alt="Checklist of eight ways to raise ecological validity in a user research study, from recruiting real users to noting artificial conditions in the report" width="1080" height="1080" /></a>
<p>Source: <a href="https://www.koji.so/visuals/ecological-validity-research-checklist">Ecological validity checklist for user research</a>, Koji</p>