17 September 2021
Imagine: you want to renovate your house. One of the first documents you come across is the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC). Filled with confidence, you start reading, ready to discover how to make your home more energy efficient. But soon you find yourself reading the same pages over and over again. The figures and terms are flying around: U-values, energy indexes and a jumble of technical terms. You want to become more sustainable, but the document makes it difficult to take action.
User tests can prevent these frustrations. With existing products, they help you uncover bottlenecks and frustrations that were overlooked during development. Based on these insights, you can improve the product. In the case of the EPC, user testing can ensure that the technical document is easy to understand.
But testing is not only useful with existing products. From research and our experience with more than 200 user tests a year, we learned that they are essential to discover from the start whether the design is intuitive and meets the needs of your users. This way, you increase the chances of success and adoption at the launch.
It is crucial to develop products and services that are not only beautiful, but also user-friendly. Whether it's websites, applications, marketing campaigns, physical documents or even ideas: almost everything your users experience, you can test with them.
In a nutshell, user testing ensures that your products better match your consumer's needs and expectations, leading to higher customer satisfaction. For the customer, this means lower costs, a more efficient development process and clear priorities. And if your customer is satisfied, it also gives employees more satisfaction.
Yet there are still many misconceptions about the usefulness of user testing. In this blog post, you will read 7 fables and facts about the importance of user testing. Find out why user testing is crucial for the success of your project.
Fact or fable?
1. "Usability testing is expensive and very time-consuming"
Fable
By not testing, you save extra budget in the short term, but it often leads to more expensive and larger modifications later on. Small-scale testing during the conceptual phase of your project can already provide a lot of valuable insights.
This way, you find out early enough whether your concept is catching on, which ultimately saves time and money. Setting the right priorities from the start is key to a successful launch.
Bebat's battery container project is a good example of the importance of timely testing. An idea conceived for adults that seems fantastic can be completely turned around by a specific target group - children.
“When we tested the usability of this used battery container, children did not use the carefully designed lid at all. They just took off the whole lid and bypassed the cover completely!”
Even with existing products, one test can lead to a crucial change that dramatically improves the overall user experience. This results in higher customer satisfaction and greater product success.
2. "We often speak to our customers and know best what they need. So additional research is unnecessary.”
Fable.
Even teams that know their target groups well make assumptions. Employees often know their product and service inside and out, which colours their feedback and thus makes it less reliable. User testing reveals blind spots and unexpected challenges. Products are usually used differently than you expect. Testing with real users provides more honest insights and surprises even experienced team members.
It can be tempting to test with employees when end users are hard to find. Employees can easily make themselves available and it saves costs. But testing with employees often generates misleading results. Employees know the product too well, they are familiar with details, limitations and functionalities and will use it differently than an outsider. User testing helps understand the obstacles and pain points experienced by real users. Precisely because users are not experts, they can provide objective and reliable feedback on how intuitive and useful a design is.
3. “Both existing end users and also new or potential users can participate in a user test”
Fact.
It is important to test not only with existing users, but also with new or potential users. Both groups offer different perspectives. Experienced users are already familiar with your product or your organisation and provide valuable feedback on details. New users have no prior knowledge yet and can point out where they get stuck or what is unclear during the first use.
This helps you discover how intuitive your product or service is and how easily new users find their way. Potential users also offer insight into what people expect or need before they start using your product or service in the first place. By testing with different end users, you get a more complete picture of how your product is perceived.
4. “We are already too far into the design process to make any adjustments.”
Fable.
It is never too late to carry out user testing. Even small tweaks at the end can make a big difference. Does your product work? Great, but that doesn't mean it is user-friendly.
Testing is the way to find out if your customers are really satisfied. By continuing to test until the end, you show that you listen to your customers and put their needs first. This sets you apart as a company by making that extra effort to provide the best user experience.
A project for Deliverect, a Belgian IT company focused on streamlining processes around food delivery, demonstrated the importance of user testing later in the process. Both a mobile and desktop version of the website were tested. This showed that users navigated the website differently via their smartphones than via their computers. They expected shorter pages and less content on mobile, while on desktop they sought more extensive information. Based on these insights, content on mobile pages was shortened. This shows that user testing, even at a later stage, provides valuable insights to improve the product before launch.
Testing doesn't stop once your product is launched. It is an ongoing process. Your users' needs are constantly changing, especially in an ever-changing society. By testing regularly, you keep picking up on those changing needs and you can constantly improve your product by responding to what your customers really need.
5. “We already have enough feedback from our users through surveys and statistics.”
Fable.
Numbers provide insight into what is happening: How many people use a functionality? How many clicks are required? How much time does someone spend on a page? But these numbers don't tell you why users are struggling or dropping out.
That's where qualitative data from user testing makes all the difference. Feedback from real users gives insight into why they encounter problems and helps you make specific improvements.
Example City of Bruges: We know how many citizens make an appointment via the website and which pages are visited for a longer period of time. But without user testing, we don't know why. Maybe the question is unclear or there are technical problems. By observing and asking in-depth questions in user tests, we found that the legend at the appointment calendar was confusing. By complementing numbers with human insights from tests, you get a complete picture and can better respond to what users really need.
6. “Our development teams work more efficiently with insights from user testing.”
Fact.
Test results provide teams the data to make informed decisions about what to prioritise. So they work faster and don't waste time on less important issues. User testing therefore leads not only to a better product, but also to a more efficient and smarter development process.
For Acerta, we organised user tests for a new flexible payroll tool. It allows employees to compose their own salary or benefits.
The tool is used by employees, HR managers and internal Acerta consultants supporting clients.
While testing an initial design, many valuable insights already emerged. For example, it turned out that the homepage for internal Acerta consultants worked well, but they wanted to personalise it with favourite actions, such as ‘create a new customer’. This feedback helped the development team to adjust their priorities, making development faster and more focused.
7. “We test a design better with 5 end users instead of 50 end users.”
Fact.
Research shows that five testers are often enough to discover the biggest problems. Note: This number only applies when you want to test the usability of a product. It is also important that they are similar users who use a product in more or less the same way.
Suppose you want to test the usability of your municipality's website. Internal employees use the website differently from citizens. Therefore, ideally, you test with 5 internal employees and 5 citizens.
Users often run into the same obstacles, and after five tests they tend to repeat themselves. Adding more testers provides few new insights. It is therefore better to save resources and schedule multiple test phases.
Are you convinced of the benefits of organising user tests but not sure how to start?
As experts in user research, we are happy to help you set up and conduct qualitative user tests.
We are happy to help you with the following challenges:
- How do I create a qualitative interview guide?
- How do I recruit the right participants?
- How do I not ask leading questions?
- How do I provide a comfortable testing environment?
- How do I analyse the information?
- How do I communicate the insights from the user tests to key stakeholders in a comprehensible and visual way?
We also offer training courses in which we take you step-by-step through the approach and implementation of user testing. This allows you to carry out successful user tests yourself within your organisation.
