Fast and Budget-Friendly User Research and Testing

You probably already know you should do user research and testing.

No matter if you’re a freelancer making complete websites for clients, an in-house designer or developer working on projects, or even a manager overseeing those projects, every website benefits from user testing.

However, testing with users can often feel like a luxury your projects cannot afford. It may seem like usability testing is too time-consuming or expensive to do. This is an outdated perception.

Today, we are spoilt for choice in terms of the techniques and tools available to us for user testing that are both fast and budget-friendly.

Why Usability Testing is Worthwhile

Just as a reminder, there are loads of reasons this style of testing is valuable.

• It provides direct input on how real users interact with your system.
• It uncovers areas of confusion, helping you improve the user interface.
• It can increase user satisfaction and loyalty by creating a product that meets their needs and is easy to use.
• It can ultimately reduce development time and costs by identifying issues early on.
• It can lead to increased sales and/or use of your system.
• It can be invaluable in resolving disagreement about design direction, usability, and content.

These things can quite literally make or break a project.

The Problem with Traditional Usability Testing

Do you picture usability testing as enticing users into a room where they sit in a chair at a computer as someone asks them to perform tasks while they writing things down on a clipboard and nod a lot? To be fair, in-person testing like that can be quite useful, but that’s the kind that is slow and relatively difficult. This kind of traditional facilitated usability testing has significant drawbacks:

• Participant Recruitment: Finding the right participants who match your target audience can be challenging, especially for niche products or specialized fields. Doctors, for example, are notoriously difficult to recruit due to their busy schedules and patient confidentiality concerns.
• Scheduling Complexity: Arranging a time and place to meet with participants for in-person testing sessions is time-consuming and logistically complex.
• High Costs: Setting up a usability lab, recruiting participants, and compensating them for their time can be expensive, especially for smaller projects or businesses with limited budgets.
• Time-Intensive: Traditional usability testing is a lengthy process. It takes significant time to set up, carry out the sessions, analyze the results, and generate actionable insights.

Fortunately, advancements in remote testing tools and techniques have made usability testing more accessible and efficient than ever before.

Remote testing tools like Lookback and Maze have streamlined the process, making it easier than ever to conduct user testing sessions without the need for in-person meetings. This saves significant time and reduces the logistical challenges associated with traditional usability testing.

Unfacilitated Testing: Even Faster Results

Unfacilitated testing takes the speed and efficiency of remote testing even further. In this method, users complete tasks using a prototype while speaking their thoughts out loud, without a facilitator present. This approach is ideal for assessing whether users can successfully perform specific actions within your interface.

By eliminating the need for a facilitator, unfacilitated testing allows you to gather insights from a larger number of participants in a shorter amount of time.

Tools like Maze also provide data insights, reducing the need to watch every session. This makes analyzing results much quicker and easier.

Even Faster Alternatives

While unfacilitated usability testing is already a speedy option, there are other user testing methods that are even faster and more budget-friendly.

First Click Testing

First Click testing is an efficient method to assess whether users understand a static interface mockup and their ability to navigate it, without the need for a complete prototype. This approach is ideal for quickly gathering initial reactions to a design concept before committing significant resources to develop an interactive prototype.

The test is inspired by a notable usability study which reveals that a user’s likelihood of successfully completing a task jumps from 46% to 87% if their initial click is accurate.

Conducting a First Click test is straightforward. Participants are shown a design and asked to indicate where they would click to accomplish a specified task.

This test is often implemented as a survey that tracks and records where users click on the design, typically visualizing this data through a heat map to show common interaction points.

8-Second Test

An 8-second test gauges if users understand a page and notice critical elements, like calls-to-action. The design is only shown to the user for 8 seconds as that is the average time somebody takes to assess a page.

The user is then asked to list what they can remember about the page and what they felt the page was about.

This is perfect for quickly validating if your page layout, content hierarchy and key messaging are effective.

Preference Tests

A preference test has the user choose between different designs or compare your design to competitors to validate your design direction. These tests are perfect for quickly validating design preferences and aesthetics. They can also be used to resolve differences between stakeholders about design direction.

Surveys

Surveys can quickly answer many questions that you may have during the design process. Common surveys include:

• Top task analysis: identifies what users want to know or do on your site and prioritizes these tasks. It is an invaluable tool for determining the information or actions your user interface should emphasize.
• Expectation Surveys: Uncovers what users expect from your site in terms of content, functionality, and experience. This can guide your design decisions to align with user needs and expectations.
• Objection Analysis: identifies the reasons why users might not take a desired action on your site, such as making a purchase or signing up for a service. By understanding these objections, you can address them in your design and content to increase conversion rates.

Surveys can be run using a tool like Pollfish, while all of the other tests can be done using specialist UX tools like Lyssna.

Whatever tool you ultimately use all of these tests are lightweight and fast to run.

Recruitment Made Easy

Even with these speedy testing methods, you might still be concerned about the challenge of recruiting the right participants. However, this too is easier than you might expect.

You Don’t Always Need to Match Your Audience

If you are testing usability, findability or scannability, finding the exact audience matters less than you think. Because this type of testing is not looking at personal preference or taste, testing with users who have similar physical or cognitive abilities is enough.

In other words, in most cases it is okay to test with anybody outside of your organization. For example, friends and family work well.

You want to avoid colleagues because they will have been institutionalized and will have a mental model that is different from the ordinary user.

Encourage People to Opt into a Customer Research Group

Of course, nothing beats working with your real audience if you can. However, constantly asking people to participate in testing can prove annoying. That is why many organizations are reluctant for you to contact their customers. To address this problem consider building an opt-in customer feedback group that you can reach out to easily.

To create an opt-in group, send out a single email to your customers asking them to join a mailing list specifically for participating in user testing. Once you have this group, you can easily reach out to them whenever you need participants for testing, without having to bother your entire customer base each time.

Using A Recruitment Service Is Cheaper Than You Think

If you do need to recruit participants that match your exact target audience, there are numerous tools that make this process fast and affordable. Services like Askable, or the built-in recruiting features of testing platforms like Lyssna and Maze, allow you to define your desired participants by demographics and screening questions. You can often recruit participants for as little as a dollar per person and get results within an hour, depending on how specific your criteria are.

No More Excuses

With all these fast, cheap, and easy methods available, there’s really no reason not to test your digital product with users. Not only does user testing provide immense value, but it can also be a great tool for resolving internal debates and resolving arguments about design and content choices.

So the next time you’re tempted to skip user testing because it seems too difficult, remember all the quick and budget-friendly options you have at your disposal. Your users (and probably your team) will thank you!