The ROI of user testing

Intro

It’s cheaper, faster, and more valuable than ever to test ideas, but on average I see bonafide UX pros not doing any testing to inform a recommendation.

Here’s what testing does for you:

1. Your prototype data is a glimpse into the future, not an analysis of past performance which is a common investor trap.

2. Better team cohesion whereby you’re the facilitator of the testing, but as a team, you’re analyzing the results.

3. You become a high-touch customer-facing function in your org, and compete with your CEO, research, sales, and CS teams for valuable insight smashing the perception of “design in a silo”.

4. If you go from interviews exclusively, to adding passive user testing, you’ve begun to deliver testing at scale, repeatedly, with higher cadence.

5. Participants become your earliest fans and adopters helping you shape the value of your work. This creates your founding testing committee who are willing to donate their time to get an opportunity to use your product vision in the future.

How do you do this?

Instead of design deliverables, get your team to buy-in to rapid learning and continuous discovery.

“What are we trying to learn?”

This should be baked into your analysis of the current state of an apps UX. Now your design work is reflecting a hypothesis, rather than a singular prescription.

The faster you can go from hypothesis to testing, the more rapid your learnings are.

“How do you go faster?”

Build your design in Figma, yes, but also design with the intention of a test. If you explore as a part of your design process, take it to the next level and really analyze what you’re trying to learn with your explorations.

Then with Maze , you’re embedding those prototypes into an unadministered user test.

If you get familiar with Maze, this workflow can be done with analysis in under a week.