User Testing
What is User Testing?
User testing is the process of evaluating a product or digital experience by observing real users as they interact with it to identify usability issues, gather feedback, and improve overall functionality. It helps businesses ensure their products meet user needs, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive better engagement.
The Basic Idea
Imagine you own a clothing store and want to take a leap into the world of e-commerce by launching an online platform. You’ve never built a website before, but with help from some friends and a few YouTube tutorials, you develop a prototype site to sell clothes on. Before launching, you want to ensure your website is user-friendly so that people can easily navigate it and make purchases.
In order to evaluate the interface of your website, you conduct user testing, recruit participants, and ask them to find and purchase a specific item to test the functionality of the prototype. By observing them while they navigate the site, you can find any pain points they encounter while trying to make the purchase.1 You observe one participant who is having trouble filtering the clothes by size. This insight allows you to make changes to your website to improve the user experience by making the filtering function easier to use. Now that you’ve enhanced your interface based on iterative user testing, you’re ready to launch your website!
User testing is a crucial tool for identifying and resolving issues related to the usability of a website or app. Although companies will first engage in internal testing, getting employees and developers to test the product, these people are familiar with the product and can have a biased perspective. Alternatively, user testing is performed with actual end users who represent the target audience, providing a fresh perspective on how people will actually interact with the product when it is launched.
There are five common methods of user testing:
- Usability Testing: Observing participants as they interact with an electronic interface to evaluate its efficiency and usability. The observation doesn’t always mean standing behind the participant (which can be daunting and skew results); it can also be analyzing their user journey (how they click from page to page) or heat maps (seeing where their cursor spends the most time) from the backend.1
- Surveys: Collecting quantitative feedback from users to understand customer satisfaction. These are usually given or sent to actual end users after they have interacted with a new feature of your product to see how it is performing.1
- A/B Testing: A form of user testing where participants are split into two different groups that each interact with a slightly different interface, helping you decide which version is better.2
- Focus Groups: Leading a discussion with a small group of real end users to gain qualitative insight into your product.
- Beta Testing: Similar to usability testing, but conducted at the final stages before your product or new feature goes live, usually focused on identifying bugs and resolving small functional issues.2
By conducting user testing through one or a combination of these methods, designers gain a better understanding of how people will actually interact with their product, enabling them to make adjustments to deliver the best product possible.
Usability is like love. You have to care, you have to listen, and you have to be willing to change.
— Jeffrey Zeldman, Principal Designer at Automattic, a technology company best known for developing and managing WordPress.com and Tumblr.3
About the Author
Emilie Rose Jones
Emilie currently works in Marketing & Communications for a non-profit organization based in Toronto, Ontario. She completed her Masters of English Literature at UBC in 2021, where she focused on Indigenous and Canadian Literature. Emilie has a passion for writing and behavioural psychology and is always looking for opportunities to make knowledge more accessible.
