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Why User Testing?

If you have a live site you are testing it on users, your site customers, but without proper evaluation and user testing, you are not learning valuable marketing information or simply improving your website.

User testing is asking a genuine user or potential customer of your site to complete tasks and assessing those tasks in a controlled environment by experienced Usability technicians.

User testing is not asking users or clients for their opinions on aesthetic aspects of your site, including colour or images or graphic design. User testing is behaviour - it's simply not what users say, it's what they do. Sometimes what they say and do can differ.

Recently, speaking to an owner of a virtual secretary business, she told me that she was in her third generation of website. She said that after receiving negative feedback from friends and colleagues about her second generation site, comments that the site did not look very professional, she replaced it with a new site.

The problem was that the new site did look better than its predecessor, however it attracted about half the amount of web traffic. If you are going to replace your website you need to know what is working, what isn't and what you should do to improve what isn't. This is where user testing comes in.

In this sense when you plan a website you need to include iterative design processes that includes evaluating and testing users, revising accordingly and improving on what you began with.

Jakob Nielsen, founder of Nielsen Norman Group, an organisation that has pioneered Usability testing, believes the more erasing you do to the original design the better, he says "you cannot make the perfect interface - no human has that capability!" Nielsen calls this design iteration.

The only way to drive iteration is to test on real users. An effective website needs to have user centred design. It needs to understand the users needs, tasks and goals. How else can we get it right? You shouldn't plan or design your website for yourself, you have to have your users perspective in your sights.

Jakob Nielson put it quite bluntly during the recent Usability in Practice conference in London:

"Do usability studies then you will end up with higher quality, if you do not, then you have lower quality."

Of course usability isn't the only component required for a successful website. Planning, marketing, technology and budget also come into play. But it is clear that design is best when it's based on user needs, this applies to all design whether it's virtual or real world like for example furniture design, which see a chair designed in a way people like to sit, rather than how the designer want the customer to sit.