User Testing, how important is it?
These days we all want something doing, and we want it done yesterday. Whether that’s at home or at work. We order online and expect next day delivery. We go to the supermarket and checkout at self-service so as to avoid idle chit chat. We email/text instead of picking up the phone for a conversation. We will all be guilty at some point of having a ‘do it now, worry later’ mentality, and with work pressures and deadlines to hit, who can blame us? But when it comes to engaging with our customers, should we be so hasty?
An uninformed user journey can be the difference between a conversion and a drop off. So why are we so keen to press the button before we are certain that our users are comfortable?
We could be the best web design team in the UK (and we are) but a user journey is ultimately determined by its users, and without testing and research, how can we ever be sure that our sites are working optimally for our clients?
So often when I ask a deadline for a website launch, the answer is ‘as soon as possible, we’re desperate’
In an ideal world, each website project would begin with Workshops, to include persona research, focus groups and client surveys. We would find out who our users were, what they wanted, their likes/dislikes and what colour socks they wore.
Running a focus group at design stage is important, and it needs to have a variety of user types and personas within the group. This makes it easier to measure how usable a feature is. The design team can show you how he or she would use the hamburger navigation which has been suggested, but what about a 50 year old salesman who has only just got a smartphone? Does he know what it does, its purpose? Can he find it without you guiding him to it? These are the type of issues that could be identified before it’s too late.
We would then create a user informed blueprint of a website. We would then use that blueprint to test the usability aspects of it before we went into any form of design. After the design, we would test it again. We would then build it, and test it again.
That way, if we have done our research and our testing right, when we launched, it would be with entire certainty that the site was functional, aesthetically pleasing and most importantly, tailored to a specific set of customer needs.
Unfortunately these days' ever decreasing timeframes seem to have reduced the practice of user testing. It seems that testing is an easy target for cutting corners and cost.
The thing is, it doesn’t have to be that costly. Or time consuming. There are plenty of great tools out there which can put you in front of real life users, and get them to test out your website. Tools such as Usability Hub and What users do, offer quick and effective solutions with their own online testing communities where you can set users simple tasks such as – find the menu, find the ‘about us’ page, put a product in your basket, go to your account etc. It’s basically providing evidence that the aspects which are crucial to your sites success, work well for their intended audience.
Most large organisations we work with are beginning to understand that this is an imperative part of the process, and are factoring it in to some extent. But it’s the smaller, more niche clients who will also see the benefits (if done correctly) You can spend thousands on a great website, but without fully knowing what engages your clients, and what turns them off, how can you ever be sure that your site performs well for its key users?