Perhaps this is a familiar story. You’ve built a new website or app, dogfooded it with your team, and now you’re ready to test with real-life users. Excitedly, you gather a few people who are most likely to be your target audience, and begin the testing sessions.
Immediately you start getting some rather… painful feedback.
- "I have no idea what this is"
- "I would never use, or come back to this website”
- "How do I log-in?” *Ignores giant log-in button*
User testing is often the moment where the rubber meets the road. All your ideas, decisions, sketches, and code comes together to create a real interface… one that a user is now attempting to use, and is forming their own ideas about.
It can be hard to watch.
Forgive me if my emotions are a bit raw from some recent feedback sessions, but I’d like to share a bit about the experience, and a few of the lessons I’ve learned along the way. Hopefully these tips can help you build better products… and not burst out crying in the middle of a user critique.
The humbling experience of testing Versioning
After a few weeks of working on Versioning, our new curation platform, with our developers, I headed to a local co-working space to watch web developers use the prototype. At this point we had a working web app. We’d been dogfooding it for a week, the SitePoint team was using it daily, and we really enjoyed it! While Versioning was rough around the edges, I thought we had a reasonably intuitive web app.
After three sessions, I was a lot less excited. People had NO CLUE what it was, or what it did. It was a hard truth - we had built something that wasn’t intuitive at all.
Testing can be a hard process. Here are a few bits of advice.
Continue reading %User Testing: Painful… But Worth It%
by Kyle Vermeulen via SitePoint
