Think-aloud protocol
Also called think aloud, concurrent think-aloud
The think-aloud protocol asks a participant to say what they are thinking as they work through a task, so a researcher hears the reasoning behind each click, not only the click.
The participant narrates as they go: what they expect a button to do, what they are looking for, why they went back. The researcher stays quiet apart from a prompt to keep talking, because a question changes what the participant does next.
It is the most common method in moderated usability testing. Its known cost is that narrating slows people down and makes them more careful than they would be alone, so it is better at explaining a problem than at measuring how often it happens.
Where Stunt Double fits
In an interview, each actor answers in its own words while it works through the product, which reads much like a think-aloud session. It is an agent’s reasoning, not a person’s, so treat it as a lead to check with people rather than a quote from one.
Related terms
- Usability testingUsability testing watches people attempt real tasks in a product to find where they hesitate, make mistakes or give up.
- Synthetic researchSynthetic research is user research run with AI participants instead of recruited people: interviews, usability tasks and studies where the participants are personas played by AI agents.
- Sycophancy in synthetic researchSycophancy is the tendency of language models to tell the person asking what they seem to want to hear. In synthetic research it shows up as simulated users who like every concept they are shown.