Usability testing

The method is simple, which is exactly why it works. The participant gets a task framed as a goal rather than an interface action: not "click the checkout button" but "buy this item for delivery tomorrow". The moderator then stays quiet and offers no hints while the participant narrates what they are doing. What gets recorded is facts rather than opinions: how long the task took, whether it was completed at all, which step caused hesitation, which word the person scanned for and did not find. The long-standing Nielsen Norman Group recommendation is five participants per round, because most recurring problems surface with the first few and later sessions repeat them.

Commercially the method is valuable because it is cheap relative to the cost of the mistake. Five forty-minute sessions amount to two or three days of work including scenario preparation and analysis. Rebuilding a checkout after launch, once conversion turns out to be half of what was expected, costs more in both budget and lost revenue. Testing works before development on a clickable prototype and equally well on a live site, where qualitative observation is joined by analytics, session recordings and click maps.

Two traps destroy the result. The first is testing on colleagues and friends: they know the product, guess the intent and spare the author’s feelings. You need people from the target audience seeing the interface for the first time. The second is prompting. The moment a moderator says "the button is top right", the exact information the session existed to produce disappears. And a third, less obvious one: testing surfaces problems, it does not design solutions. "Users could not find delivery options" is the input to design work, not a finished requirement to make the button red.

Related terms

• WireframeA wireframe is a rough screen schematic without colour, typography or imagery: it fixes which blocks exist, their priority and the transitions between screens, so the interface logic is agreed before expensive visual design starts.
• Design systemA design system is a set of tokens, components and usage rules that exists simultaneously in the design files and in code, fixing colours, typography, spacing and element states so that a new screen is assembled from existing parts rather than reinvented.
• DiscoveryDiscovery is a one to three week pre-project phase that frames the problem, studies users and competitors, describes scenarios and constraints, and produces a prototype, a specification and an estimate with a justified range instead of a number pulled from the air.
• Behavioural signalsBehavioural signals describe how users act in the results page and on the site: whether they click the snippet, whether they bounce back to search afterwards, how long they stay; Yandex uses them in ranking and penalises manipulation aggressively.
• Responsive designResponsive design is an approach where a single layout reorganises itself to the viewport: grid, typography and block order change at defined breakpoints instead of sending the visitor to a separate mobile version on its own subdomain.

Related services

• UX/UI design for websites and appsWe design interfaces that survive contact with production: research, structure, UI kit and a clean handoff to the developers. Everything lives in Figma as components with real states and real breakpoints, not as a folder of flat mockups. The same process covers landing pages, corporate sites, e-commerce, web apps and mobile.
• IT consulting and product auditThe most expensive mistakes in software happen before the first line of code: a misread problem, a stack chosen out of a contractor’s habit, and a specification that does not exist. Consulting exists to settle all of that before the development meter starts running: what to build, out of what, at what cost and in which order. The result is a document, not an opinion on a call.

Read more

• UX Research Without a Lab Budget: What Actually Produces ResultsMost teams do not need a research department, they need to stop guessing. Methods ranked by cost and payoff, the five-user rule and its important caveat, and how to turn findings into decisions without a sixty-page report nobody reads.
• Design Systems: When They Pay Off and When They Are an Expensive ToyMost teams asking for a design system need a component library and naming discipline instead. Where the line sits, how to calculate the payback before you start, and what actually belongs in a minimum viable version.