Why You Need User Testing (And How to Convince Others to Feel the Same)
You want to build a better product. Maybe you have complaints from your users about your existing product. Maybe you want to validate an idea. Maybe you the product you are working on just isn’t meeting your personal standards for quality. In any of these cases, you can (and should) execute user testing to get the data you need to improve your product.
Convincing your boss or client to test with users isn’t always an easy task though— it takes time and money. And that’s aside from helping them understand how it’s valuable.
The following article can help product managers, small businesses and entrepreneurs who may not have the budget to hire a research consultant or staff member, but are driven to build products or improve experiences for their users. It’s also for new UX professionals who are trying to learn more about how testing can give data to improve product designs.
What is User Testing
Let’s back up a bit and start from the beginning. User testing is when you analyze and measure the user experience of a product as a whole, or sometimes just a portion of it. In its most simplified state, it’s about testing and quantifying how someone uses your product — which is often different than how you think they should use your product.
User testing can record and observe a set of user’s performing tasks with a product to find errors and areas of improvement for product development. It can also involve asking a user how the quality of the experience was for them.
Since many things go into a user’s experience, the focus of the testing can comprise of many different things. It can be a new product or existing one, as well as a new feature or existing one. We’ll cover some of those things later in this article.
What I would like to make clear upfront is that user testing must be with people outside of your immediate product circle, and it is ideally with your target users (more about them later). So that means anyone working on your product should not be a tester. Why? Well if someone has been working tirelessly on a product, they begin to get so familiar with it that they miss the details. It must test how a user would actually use your product in the real world. As stated in the book Lean Startup, by Eric Ries, you need to “get out of the building” and meet with users.
Who Should User Test
Hopefully the fact that you are reading this article is a sign that you want to take the next step in developing a human-centered product. Good for you!
One thing that I want to make clear is that user testing is not something that requires a dedicated researcher to execute. While a user researcher will drastically help you achieve results faster and probably a little more accurately, in the end this is something that you can do on your own. As a UX professional, I have worked with dedicated user researchers before, and I can tell you from experience that they are definitely worth the expense. But understandably the expense of a full time role is something that not everyone can afford.
Whether you can do this on your own or not is really a question of time — your time. It will take some time to plan and execute a user test, and it can take a fairly significant amount of effort depending on the amount of metrics you want, but it is completely possible for someone who hasn’t tested before to do it. You should not underestimate the amount of work it will take, but at the same time you shouldn’t underestimate the amount of effort it will take to do alone.
A common perception is that it takes too long and costs too much to do research. That is simply not true. User research can be scaled to whatever size you need, even if that means posting up at a coffee shop or around your office.
User testing allows product teams to discover usability and design issues with their products before they go to the larger market. It’s important to discover these type of issues early as opposed to when they have been exposed to the larger market. It’s almost always cheaper to address these problems now rather than later.
Why User Test
User testing is valuable at different stages of product development for a multitude of reasons. At its core, user testing can help save money, save time and increase user satisfaction for you business or product
User testing saves time
First let’s start with time. I am sure you’re thinking that there is no way that user testing is going to SAVE you time. In fact, you probably think it’s going to do the opposite. In some cases, you may be right, but in many you may be wrong when you think of the long term benefits.
User testing can save you from making costly mistakes now, rather than later. The longer you wait in product development and growth to solve big problems with your product, the longer it will take you to fix those things down the line. Especially in applications and web design, the more complex the product becomes, the harder it gets to fix newly discovered problems. The harder it gets, the more time it takes to fix them.
And while it’s going to take some of you or your team’s time to execute these tests, mitigating the problems you may uncover now could take only a fraction of a time of what they may be later.
User testing saves money
In the same vein as time, you are probably assuming that in no way is a user test going to save you money. Again, you may be right, but if there are underlying problems in your product you will probably be wrong.
Rewriting code or redesigning layouts doesn’t come for free, especially when you are starting all over again.
Finding a problem before a product is completed is almost always cheaper than fixing it later.
User centered design improves customer satisfaction
Products that focus on user experiences have been proven to increase customer satisfaction. If you have gotten this far in the guide, your reading it because of one of two things…
- You deeply care about the experience your users have with your product
- You know that improving customer satisfaction will likely have an impact on sales and your bottom line.
Making Your Case
Making a case for usability testing isn’t always an easy sell. Sometimes it takes a bit of persuasion to be able to convince stakeholders that it is worth the time and investment.
When in situations like this, sometimes selling the benefits of a user test are all it takes.
You can use a simple business case like this:
Dear Boss,
It would be valuable to conduct a user test for our product. The user test would be valuable for the following reasons.
- It will mitigate the risk for user errors
- It will make the users happier
- Happier users means more customers
- It will help the PO prioritize the backlog
- It will decrease support and development costs by catching the problems earlier.
Sincerely,
You
In other cases, you may need to bring in some more heavy hitting information, such as examples. In the below case studies from usertesting.com, user testing was a huge success.
- Zillow increased engagement and conversions by over 8%
- Evernote increased user retention by 15%
- Speek boosted registration by 60% [1]
[1] https://www.usertesting.com/resources/case-studies
If you need information like case studies to convince a stakeholder, be sure to include them in your business plan.
Prioritized improvements
Even if you do not uncover drastic problems with your product through user testing, you may discover things that need improvements. By having metrics around your users’ experience, you can justify the cost around making changes to what you already have. You can also develop a prioritized list of improvements based on how well or poorly a product performed.
After testing, you can sort a list of issues so that user experience can be a central metric in product improvement.
