thinking aloud research method

Thinking Aloud

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• Yao Xiang 2 &
• Yan Guoli 3  

It is a way of thinking where in the process of problem-solving or reasoning, an individual verbally reports the process of thinking. It is also known as think aloud protocol. Thinking aloud sometimes also refers to a research method for studying cognitive processes, whereby the researchers ask the subjects to describe their process of problem-solving, as detailed as possible, while performing various complex tasks. Initially proposed by German psychologist Karl Duncker in 1926, this method was applied by American psychologist Allen Newell and Herbert Simon in 1972 to the field of problem-solving and received extensive attention from other researchers.

Thinking aloud makes the thinking process explicit and turns thinking into a process that can be directly observed. Because thinking is a slow and long-lasting process with complex internal operations and the existence of multiple options, it was very difficult to measure. The research method of thinking aloud requires the subjects to...

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Peng D-L (2004) General psychology. Beijing Normal University Publishing House, Beijing

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School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China

Institute of Psychology and Behavior, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China

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Xiang, Y., Guoli, Y. (2024). Thinking Aloud. In: The ECPH Encyclopedia of Psychology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6000-2_390-1

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6000-2_390-1

Received : 15 December 2023

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Published : 31 January 2024

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

Thinking aloud: the #1 usability tool.

January 15, 2012 2012-01-15

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"Thinking aloud may be the single most valuable usability engineering method."

I wrote this in my 1993 book, Usability Engineering , and I stand by this assessment today. The fact that the same method has remained #1 for 19 years is a good indication of the longevity of usability methods .

Usability guidelines live for a long time ; usability methods live even longer. Human behavior changes much more slowly than the technology we all find so fascinating, and the best approaches to studying this behavior hardly change at all.

In This Article:

Defining thinking aloud testing, benefits of think-aloud, downsides of think-aloud.

To define thinking aloud , I'll paraphrase what I said 19 years ago:

Definition: In a thinking aloud test, you ask test participants to use the system while continuously thinking out loud — that is, simply verbalizing their thoughts as they move through the user interface.

("Simply" ought to be in quotes, because it's not that simple for most people to keep up a running monologue. The test facilitator typically has to prompt users to keep them talking.)

To run a basic thinking aloud usability study, you need to do only 3 things:

• Recruit representative users .
• Give them representative tasks to perform.
• Shut up and let the users do the talking.

The method has a host of advantages. Most important, it serves as a window on the soul , letting you discover what users really think about your design. In particular, you hear their misconceptions, which usually turn into actionable redesign recommendations: when users misinterpret design elements, you need to change them. Even better, you usually learn why users guess wrong about some parts of the UI and why they find others easy to use.

The thinking aloud method also offers the benefits of being:

• Cheap. No special equipment is needed; you simply sit next to a user and take notes as he or she talks. It takes about a day to collect data from a handful of users , which is all that's needed for the most important insights.
• Robust. Most people are poor facilitators and don't run the study exactly according to the proper methodology. But, unless you blatantly bias users by putting words into their mouths, you'll still get reasonably good findings, even from a poorly run study. In contrast, quantitative (statistical) usability studies are ripe with methodology problems  and the smallest mistake can doom a study and make the findings directly misleading. Quant studies are also much more expensive .
• Flexible. You can use the method at any stage in the development lifecycle, from early paper prototypes  to fully implemented, running systems. Thinking aloud is particularly suited for Agile projects . You can use this method to evaluate any type of user interface with any form of technology (although it's a bit tricky to use thinking aloud with speech interfaces — see report on How to Conduct Usability Evaluations for Accessibility  for advice on testing with blind or low-vision users who rely on screen readers such as JAWS). Websites, software applications, intranets, consumer products, enterprise software, mobile design: doesn't matter — thinking aloud addresses them all, because we rely on the users doing the thinking.
• Convincing. The most hard-boiled developers, arrogant designers, and tight-fisted executives usually soften up when they get direct exposure to how customers think about their work. Getting the rest of your team (and management) to sit in on a few thinking-aloud sessions doesn't take a lot of their time and is the best way to motivate them to pay attention to usability. (For more on how to motivate teams to deliver superior user experiences, see the UX Basic Training  course.)
• Easy to learn. We teach the basics in a day  and provide thorough team training in a 2-day "Learning-by-Doing" course . Of course, this doesn't cover all the twists and advanced modifications needed to hang out your shingle as a usability consultant, but the point is that you don't need these extras to run basic tests for your own design team .

Being cheap and robust are huge upsides of qualitative methods such as thinking aloud. But the flip side is that the method doesn't lend itself to detailed statistics , unless you run a huge, expensive study. You can certainly do this — I simply don't recommend it for the vast majority of projects. Better to conserve your budget and invest in more design iterations .

Other problems:

• Unnatural situation. Unless they're a bit weird, most people don't sit and talk to themselves all day. This makes it hard for test participants to keep up the required monologue. Luckily, users are typically quite willing to try their best, and they quickly become so engaged in the test tasks  that they all but forget that they're in a study. You can show users a short video demo of a think-aloud session to quickly and vividly explain what's expected of them.
• Filtered statements (vs. brain dump). Users are supposed to say things as soon as they come to mind rather than reflect on their experience and provide an edited commentary after the fact. However, most people want to appear smart, and thus there's a risk that they won't speak until they've thought through the situation in detail. Don't fall for this trap: it's essential to get the user's raw stream of thought. Typically, you have to prompt users to keep them talking.
• Biasing user behavior. Prompts and clarifying questions are usually necessary, but from an untrained facilitator, such interruptions can very easily change user behavior. In such cases, the resulting behavior doesn't represent real use, so you can't base design decisions on the outcome. At the very least, try to identify those cases where you've biased the user so you can discard that small part of the study. (It's worse when you don't know that you've done wrong — then you risk giving the design team bad advice.)
• No panacea. That this one method isn't the only usability tool you'll ever need is not a true downside, as long as you are willing to use other methods from time to time. Thinking aloud serves many purposes, but not all purposes. Once you get a few years' experience with usability, you'll want to use a wider range of user research methods .

Don't let the downsides get you down. If you haven't tried it before, go run a quick thinking aloud study on your current design project right now. Because these simplified studies are so cheap, weekly user testing  is completely feasible — so if you make a few mistakes the first time, you can always correct them next week.

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Think aloud study: qualitative studies

How to use a think aloud study to evaluate your digital health product.

Think aloud methods ask participants to verbalise what they are thinking and doing as they perform a task using your digital health product or service.

What to use it for

It is carried out to understand user experience of your product, for example, to uncover usability problems with navigation, or highlight content that could be improved. It is usually used as a method for carrying out usability testing .

You can use think aloud:

• when you are developing your product, to work out how to make it better (formative or iterative evaluation)
• once you have a product and want to improve it, for example by adding new content or features

Benefits of think aloud include:

• it provides insight into people’s experiences as they interact with your product
• it can be cheap to carry out
• it can be carried out with low numbers of participants

Drawbacks of think aloud include:

• it relies on people verbalising thoughts and impressions, rather than objective measures
• participants may say what they believe to be the right answer rather than what they really think (social desirability). This can distort your results and conclusions
• it cannot tell you whether your product has an impact on the outcomes you wanted

How to carry out a think aloud study

Plan the study.

Decide what questions you want your study to answer. For example, whether users can find particular content or what their understanding is of the information presented.

Create a written plan, including:

• tasks for the user to complete while using your digital product
• a set of open-ended questions

Decide how many participants you want to recruit and how long you want the sessions to last (45 to 90 minutes works well).

Conduct the study

Typically, you should have a facilitator who runs the study and observers to make notes. Having more than one researcher making notes can increase the reliability of the findings. This is especially important if you’re not planning to record and transcribe the sessions.

Ask the participants to complete the tasks you have planned. This should be uninterrupted as far as possible, although the moderator will probably need to give some prompts. Explain to the participants how a think aloud works: they should tell you their thoughts, reactions and emotions as they occur while they are performing the task (concurrent think-aloud).

Another possible approach is a retrospective think aloud. Here, the participant talks through an interaction they previously performed, often using a video recording of the interaction as a prompt. This avoids the act of thinking aloud from interfering with the performance of the task, but the participant may not remember as much.

Before the think aloud, it may also help to explain to participants that:

• this is not a test and there are no right or wrong answers; it’s about understanding how the product or service works for them
• they can be critical about the product – the researchers won’t be offended

Participants don’t need to provide an explanation of their thoughts. They may feel they need to justify their thoughts, especially in front of a researcher who we may have never met, but there are various ways to overcome this obstacle in a think aloud session. For example:

• you could use a warm-up task to help the participant to focus. For example, you could start the think aloud with another section of your website that isn’t the focus of your research.
• the researcher could sit behind the participant to decrease distraction

If the participant falls silent, prompt them to verbalise their thoughts – for example, ‘what are you thinking?’. Try not to do this too often or to lead the participant towards certain answers.

The qualitative data from a think aloud study is classified into meaningful categories. You can do this using various analysis methods typically used for qualitative studies, such as:

• thematic analysis
• framework analysis
• basic counting of numerical data, such as categories or frequencies

Example: Evaluating digital health products - as we expand, we test the structure and content

While developing this resource, the one you are reading now, we created more content and added new pages. As the resource grew, the structure and navigation of the website became less fit for purpose and we decided to conduct a think aloud study to investigate how it could be improved.

We gave participants a scenario: imagine you are developers of an app designed to help insomnia and you want to evaluate it. We asked them to say everything they thought of out loud as they used the resource to complete the task. We showed participants 3 versions of the website homepage: the existing version, and two alternative prototypes. We alternated the order in which participants saw the different versions.

We conducted 4 think aloud sessions, with a facilitator and 2 observers taking comprehensive notes. We collated the findings using a collaborative online tool, grouping observations into:

• what aspects helped participants
• what didn’t help participants
• any additional features they needed

Each category had a different colour on our board (green – helpful, pink – unhelpful, orange – new feature wanted). We organised them and looked at similarities in two new versions, and differences between versions 1 and 2.

Some findings were the same across all participants:

• adding numbered sections in the guidance helped them to navigate the information
• more bullet points helped them to scan the content
• subheadings helped to break up long lists of content and make them less overwhelming

Based on the feedback, we created a version of the website structure, which can be validated with a second set of user testing.

More information and resources

Participants may find it difficult and unnatural to say everything that comes to their mind out loud. Here is a video by the Nielsen Norman Group explaining what it means to ‘think aloud’ . The resource also explains how to create your own demo video for your study.

GOV.UK guidance on using think aloud as part of moderated usability testing

GOV.UK user research blog with practical tips for running a think aloud study

Examples of think aloud studies in digital health

McCall and others (2021), Development of a Mobile App to Support Self-Management of Anxiety and Depression in African American Women: A Usability Study . Researchers used think aloud as one of their methods to evaluate the usability of the app prototype tailored to the needs of African American women to help with anxiety and depression.

Szinay and others (2021), Influences on the Uptake of Health and Well-being Apps and Curated App Portals: Think-Aloud and Interview Study . Researchers were interested in how people choose apps for health and wellbeing. They used think aloud to explore what influences the selection process when looking online.

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