There are multiple touch-points where feedback from users on a product may be received: sales, surveys, user testing, and customer success. Every area is important however I will be focusing mostly on user testing.

I have conducted countless user testing sessions and observed many more. There are key patterns I noticed that enhance or breakdown the session. If you are someone that has hosted these before, you’ve probably had times where the feedback was a dead end, wasting time and money. This article is meant to help minimize these issues and help both veterans and juniors alike.

Know your audience

If you are in UX it should go without question that knowing your audience is a key factor to success. There are many approaches and books on how to conduct user testing, however, we should start at a fundamental level to understand where we went wrong. Unless you are working on a product that is with tech-savvy users that understand the process, you may have unintentionally introduced a lot of bias before you start testing users.

When someone tries your product at home or in their work environment, they are in their safe-zone. They fully control and understand the decisions they make have no consequence or judgment.

When you take someone out of their comfort zone they may inadvertently be on the defensive and take actions carefully. Your goal as a host is to remove these notions and bring them towards a neutral state of mind.

A lot of UX researchers focus on the questions they will ask without much thought into the fundamentals on how their visitor may feel in the new environment.

Language barriers

No not because your first language is different than the guest coming in; it’s the wording of the session. “User Testing” feels as if a test is being presented and tasks need to be done correctly. In fact, almost every time I brought in someone for “user testing” they would ask me what happens if they do something wrong? Well, it’s not the user we are testing, it is our products.

It’s not the user we are testing, it is our products.

If you’ve been using the term user testing in your recruitment for feedback, try changing the terminology to “Product feedback.” A phrase along those lines will not only change their tone but empower them to critique freely.

One of the toughest changes I have made is to not refer to the user…as a user. It may be a minutiae gesture, but it may also help build the relationship if you refer to them as your guest.

Environmental factors