Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Skjoldbroder

Testing is all about learning. But what will we learn? This is a reflection on 9 general patterns encountered across usability tests.

User testing shines a bright light on bad design (credit: Davide Cantelli via Unsplash)

Results from a user test

We can’t know beforehand what we’ll learn in a test — if we could, there would be no point in testing! But we can be completely sure that we’ll have two things: 1) a list of concrete yet-to-be-revealed things to fix, and 2) knowledge about several of the following 9 areas:

Our blind spots. Testing reveals many of the biases, assumptions, internalised knowledge and habits we carry around with us, and which we embody in our designs
Our language. The way we speak and write is always biased by the organisation and team we work in. This is not a bad thing as such — it helps build group identity and cohesiveness, for one. But it is important to realise that users are not part of the group, and therefore it is not their language. Testing will help point out where we can improve our language.
Pain points. This kind of goes without saying — we test because we want to find the user pains, i.e. the places in the design that impacts the user experience negatively.
Give-up-points. I don’t know if the term formally exists, but we definitely want to find the points where users actually give up completing tasks. I think it’s a valid distinction because some design flaws will “merely incur a pain”, whereas others are so severe that users will rage-quit. Pain points do also compound, of course.
Flaws in our decisions. Any design or development process includes a ton of decisions, big and small. Sometimes these decisions are flawed. Testing will help determine how they are flawed, and what we might do to remedy that.
Inadvertent screw-ups. Sometimes stuff has inadvertently become part of a design. Nobody asked for it — it was just sort of included, by someone, on a Friday afternoon, maybe after a couple of beers. It was probably that freelancer we hired for two months! Anyway. Testing can help bring those kinds of mistakes to our attention.
Proving / disproving our hypotheses. We may have a nagging feeling that something isn’t right. Testing will give you concrete data to help you validate or invalidate. Which is pretty obvious, but anyway — I included it in the list.
Finding the “why”. Quantitative data can give you a “what”, but the “why” you get from qualitative research such as user testing is invaluable because the two combined lets you figure out how you might proceed. Analytics shows nobody uses that cool feature you built — testing will show you why.
Empathy for the user! Finally and most obviously, a test is a chance to meet users face to face and have a chat with them about their life, needs, wants, desires. It’s a great opportunity to understand them, laugh with them and develop some of that empathy we all rave so much about.

Wrap-up / summary

For some, it’s second nature that we should test. It is obvious to us that it is a way of learning how close to the mark our judgements and decision have gotten us, and a way of figuring out where to go next. Maybe it is a bit too obvious, to the point that we forget that we were once new to the discipline.

For others, the purpose and benefits of usability testing is more opaque, and the results are unclear. There may be more issues at work here. Perhaps a belief that total and error-free specification is possible up-front, rendering testing pointless. Or perhaps a lack of first-hand experience, which is a real eye-opener. Whatever the reason, I hope this short write-up has given some food for thought about the kinds of results you can expect to see when you test with users, and established the point that user testing is a necessary activity if you want to learn and iterate.

Thanks for reading! It has been helpful for me to have some general bullets about the merits of user testing. If you have anything to add, please do leave a comment — now have a great weekend! 🙂

Usability testing — what will it result in? was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Usability testing — what will it result in?

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