As Joshua Porter says, "The behavior you're seeing is the behavior you designed for."
Those who know me know that I relish the chance to get my work in front of users — whether that means carrying print-outs to the desks of unfamiliar team members, reading through user-submitted feedback, or — when timelines and budgets allow — observing full-blown user testing.
Traditional brand advertisers, consumed with the photography and copywriting nuances of the brand platform, sometimes underestimate the level of effort that goes into designing usable websites or applications. And the guilt is not limited to the client alone. In the past, I’ve caught myself growing quick to accept that usability testing would not be a part of a project. Or, worse — assuming from the beginning that timeline or budget would prevent it from taking place, without ever voicing the recommendation.
At SXSW, a hands-on presentation by Intuit’s Vidya Dinamani, Director of Customer Experience and Rachel Evans, Experience Design Principal Research Scientist, revived my recognition of the need for user testing in any good design.
And so, in the spirit of my newfound commitment to user feedback, I’d like to shed some light on a few common user research fallacies that I’ve heard in time as a UX practitioner.
Once you’ve done usability testing, you don’t need to do it again.
Sometimes this is true. Maybe your site is a static, finished masterpiece! Its going on to A/B testing and you’re in polishing mode now. If you’ve performed several rounds of usability and users are performing tasks with flying colors, you can begin using more precise methods of testing to push that completion (or conversion) rate even further. But if you haven’t reached that point — or you did reach it in the past, but you’re now making notable changes to the user experience — you need to take it back to the users. The learnings you collected from the left nav design may not be relevant to the horizontal nav design. When in doubt, retest — formally or informally — and see how users interact.
Usability testing is a great way to get feedback about aesthetics.
No way, Jose! Done right, usability shows you how users interact with a site or application — whether they can use the menus and find the paths they need to in order to complete a task successfully. Asking users subjective questions kicks off a chain of events that normally ends in a poorly made business decision. Explore some of the other interesting ways to get design feedback.
Getting user feedback takes way too much time and effort.
Many companies look at the costs associated with prepping a prototype, bringing in moderators, recruiting and screening participants, awaiting the report, iterating based on the feedback… and understandably, the see dollar signs flying by. Fair enough.
Testing doesn’t have to be that complicated — and perhaps it sometimes shouldn’t be. There are many ways to skin a cat and testing multiple ideas generates insights rapidly. And quite naturally, teams that present ideas that they’ve become married to are more likely to perceive user feedback as tweaks to the original idea, when tossing the entire idea out is really the most appropriate action. So test early — and save the precise, formal testing for later in the project.
Analytics will suffice.
I’ve been asked, “Do we really need usability testing since we’ll do A/B testing later down the line?” This is an easy one. While the numbers can tell us what users are doing… but they cannot tell us why. In lieu of the why, we often end up crafting our own assumptions. Have you ever heard someone report time on site as a success metric because it shows that “users were highly engaged with the site?”
The truth is, numbers are only numbers — nothing more, nothing less. Usability gives us insight into the reasons users are doing what they’re doing.
Perhaps users are highly engaged with your content. Or perhaps they’re lost! You need to know which.
There’s a lot of great thinking in the user testing space, and as much as I dig it all, I’ve got a lot to learn. Yet hopefully, some of these basics I’ve learned come in handy to you as you design (and test). Happy testing!
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