A sure way to have an unsuccessful product is to skip or ignore User Testing. Let me say this loud and clear for the people in the back. You are designing for your users, not for yourself. Are you your user? Are the developers your users? Is the product manager your user? Likely not.

Mastering the balance between satisfying business and stakeholder requirements while ensuring your users have a great experience is one of the most challenging parts of being a User Experience Designer, but that’s why there is User Testing.

Why Should You User Test?

There is one easy way for me to tell you why you need to User Test. According to a study by Microsoft, the average human now has an attention span of only eight seconds. Another article by Nielsen Norman Group states that the first 10 seconds of a webpage visit is critical for the user to decide whether they stay or leave. If you take only one thing from this article please let it be this:

Your users have roughly 10 seconds to decide whether your product is worth their time. Once they determine that it’s not worth their time, they will not be back.

Your potential users will have moved onto another product by the time you roll out any changes. This is why User Testing is so important. The goal is to catch those usability issues and those features you didn’t know they wanted before releasing your product.

When Should You User Test?

There’s no real hard and fast answer to this, but in my personal opinion, I believe in testing throughout the entire design process so that I can maintain focus on the user without needing to backtrack. I’ve even tested as early as pen and paper sketches through rapid prototyping.

I do however strongly advise that most testing takes place before development begins. I build User Testing into the sprint and level of effort to ensure the scrum master, project manager, and client if applicable, all account for this as part of the UX process. If usability issues arise, I continue to iterate on the design until I’ve satisfied all user concerns, and then it will get handed to the development team.

What If There Is No Budget To User Test?

User Testing can be costly upfront, but the return on investment is HUGE and there are countless studies out there to tell you that. Usertesting.com reported that Nordstrom Rack saved $90k per day by changing how users add items to the cart on their website after discovering usability issues during testing. You can see just in this one example how much more successful their website was after performing User Testing.

These days there are plenty of platforms available at all different price ranges to help you automate User Testing into your process. But what do you do if you can’t get a budget to use one of those tools for User Testing? You do it manually! Sure it takes more time, and you are doing a lot more work analyzing the results yourself, but you could always recruit a notetaker and/or researcher to help you with this part.

Here are two simple ways to User Test without the need for any expensive software or pricey recruiters.

Option 1: Test internally

Testing internally at your place of business is probably the cheapest and fastest way to User Test. If you decide to go this route, just be careful of testing with internal people who may have unconscious biases. The company I work for is focused on a certain type of technology, and nearly everyone within my team and the surrounding departments are biased towards that technology. So it’s likely not the best idea to test with these people. However, there are people who might work in the HR and Finance departments who would be a little less biased because they are so disconnected from the product development team and what we do. Offering some coffee or donuts in exchange for a quick hallway test is a great way to test for super cheap.

For context, when I formerly worked at a finance company I was lucky enough to have access to financial advisors who were our actual users. I was able to go up a few floors of our building and sit in the kitchen with some cookies and ask financial advisors to test my design. Even just through something as simple as this, I was able to uncover some great bits of information that I could iterate on quickly thanks to User Testing.

Option 2: Recruit your own users

When you work with a recruiter you target very specific users to test with, but of course, this costs money. You can get pretty close to your target users by finding them in common places, this is called guerrilla testing.

For example, let’s say you are designing a fitness application and you want to test it with users who regularly workout. You can head to your nearest gym, yoga studio, or boxing club and see if anyone would be willing to test your prototype. You will definitely get better results if you offer some type of incentive, but if you explain that you are trying to make the experience better for them, then you might find that people are excited to learn and see what you have done.

Another great place to recruit users is through social media. Nowadays there are Facebook groups for everything. If your target demographic is people who own pets, you can bet there are several groups for that. Recruit users through these groups and set up video calls to test your designs.

Don’t be afraid to also look at your inner circle for users. Back when I designed a language learning application, I had a good amount of friends who were trying to learn a new language. I used this to my advantage and tested with several users who all uncovered features they wanted that I hadn’t thought of.