How important is User Testing?
For the most part of our work, we as designers focus on creating beautiful interfaces, really good looking interactions and so on, but usually, we don’t bother or take the time, to test our designs will some real people. Maybe it’s expensive, maybe you try it with your co-workers, but that’s not real user testing, people kinda know what to do and how to do it, so in this post, I will try to explain a couple reasons why is important to do some user testing and how to achieve the best result why the resources you might have.
1) Grab people that don’t know anything about your design: This might be not as easy as it sounds. You need to look for people who are mere mortals or just the new person on the development team, so they have no idea of what your design is all about.
2) Ask questions: While the user is navigating through the design, ask why is doing it that way, why is his/her focus on that, and most important, did he/she notice what you were trying to make visible?. Those are some basic questions you need to have under your belt.
3) Don’t be a creep: Most of us when we make user testing look at the screen or the person doing it almost like judging what they are doing and how they are interacting. People feel that pressure and try to do everything as fast as they can and that won’t get you real-life data to work with.
4) Be simple: Don’t ask the user to go a do that and then to check this and so on, just try to make the user do specific things you need to check, for example: “How would you do if you want to send an email?” or “How would you log in to the website?”.
5) Record the interaction if you can: At first glance, you might miss something the user did or did not do, if you can record the user interacting and check it later, you will have more to work with.
6) Remember the user this is not a final product and they are testing: User testing can be implemented in any part of the process of a product, but you are doing it to make the end product better.
7) Always remember the tester that there are no bad interactions: Sometimes when the user does something we don’t want to, they feel like they are doing a test and did something wrong, and that’s not the case! If the user did something they won’t suppose to do it’s our fault because the design wasn’t clear.
These tips are simple but there are many many more, with time you will get your own way of user testing and might delete some of this and add some of your own, just remember that user testing is very important when creating a product, it can help you prevent future bugs and improve the user interaction.
