The Importance of Usability Testing
As a one-person design team throughout much of my early career, I never did a lot of usability testing. Whenever asked about this by other designers, I’d often say “I simply don’t have time, we have too many projects going on” or “I can’t get executive buy-in to allow me to do usability testing.” These statements may be somewhat true, but there are some fallacies to poke at. It wasn’t until I read Stephen Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think that my view on this changed completely.
You don’t know what you don’t know
As designers, especially in early-stage startups, we rely heavily on intuition. We also tend to rely too much on second-hand customer feedback, such as through Sales and Customer Success. We need to consider this, though: what do Sales teams care about? How about Customer Success teams? At a basic level, they care about closing new business and retaining existing business, respectively.
This is very different from what motivates designers. While designers need a proper understanding of the business context for each feature, what drives us is to provide the best experience for the customer. This is why it is so important for designers to perform usability tests first-hand. It’s hard to know what the best experience is for the customer if you don’t ask them!
What it isn’t
When designers think “Usability Testing”, they may get an image of lab rooms with one-way mirrors and fluorescent lighting. Yes, these types of testing methods do exist, and they are great! However, you most likely don’t have access to one of these usability labs. And, even if you did, it takes a lot of time and energy to conduct formal usability tests. It doesn’t have to be this way. Usability testing is simply a way for designers to generate product feedback, and we can do so in less than 30 minutes.
What it is
Usability testing is a way for designers to generate feedback on a product or set of product features. The fidelity of usability testing may vary depending on the size of your company and the number of resources allotted. For this article, we are going to focus on usability testing in the context of a bootstrapped startup.
In his book, Krug recommends setting aside one morning a month to perform a set of tests. I know I can set aside 3 hours a month for such an important task, even if it gets busy. Next, Krug suggests you can fit three usability tests into this morning session (30 minutes each, with 30 minutes of transition time between users). Conducting usability tests with three users allows you to gather an appropriate sample of feedback.
Running these sessions is pretty straightforward. Krug has a sample script https://www.sensible.com/downloads/test-script.pdf on his website if you need a starting place. The thing to remember is — don’t guide the user, and don’t ask leading questions. If they are struggling, just ask them “What are you thinking?” These are the moments where you will generate the most key feedback. You should be careful not to let the user give up so easily.
Krug recommends having the sessions recorded live, so your team of product people and engineers can watch and take notes in real-time in a separate room. While this is ideal, I don’t think it’s necessary. What I do think is necessary is scheduling some time to review the usability tests with your team after the sessions are complete. I would recommend scheduling a long lunch for 2 hours that afternoon where you can get everyone in the room. That way, you can watch the tests as a group, compare notes, and establish some basic next steps.
Why is it so important?
As I said above, “you don’t know what you don’t know.” This is the first and foremost reason why you should do usability testing. The career curve of a designer is interesting. As we gain experience, our strength of intuition grows in parallel. This is a great skill to have as a designer, but it is also dangerous! We are not the average user (there is no such thing) which makes feedback vital to building great products.
A second and often overlooked benefit of usability testing is visibility. No, not executive visibility — engineering visibility! It’s an old and worn out trope that engineers and designers are always at each other’s throats. I despise this notion — we are all working towards the same goals of building a great product, and everyone’s opinion is valid. Engineers are your friends and vice versa. Without each other, you can’t build great products!
Including engineers in the review of usability sessions has two benefits. For engineers, they can see how much work you are putting into the designs, and will be more agreeable with your design decisions. As designers, you’ll quickly realize just how observant engineers are. They will pick up on things in usability tests that you may have never noticed! Bring engineers along with you.
Wrapping up
If you take anything away from this article, I’d like you to feel empowered to try at least one usability test this month. No, its not going to be perfect — it never is! But you will be glad you did it. Think of the next time you’re in a room of stakeholders, and your designs are being challenged. You should always acknowledge feedback, but if the feature change was driven by usability testing — BOOM! — you have great reasoning behind your decision. Your stakeholders will have more respect for you.
I also highly recommend reading Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, as well as his other book Rocket Surgery Made Easy which is entirely focused on usability testing. Reading his books spawned the inspiration for writing this article.
