This post originally appeared on the
Sliced Bread Design blog.
Almost every company I talk to wants to test their products, get customer feedback, and iterate based on real user metrics, but all too often they have some excuse for why they just never get around to it. Despite people's best intentions, products constantly get released with little to no customer feedback until it's too late.
I'm not trying to promote any specific methodology for testing your products or getting customer feedback. Whether you're doing formal usability testing, contextual inquiries, surveys, a/b testing, or just calling up users to chat, you should be staying in contact with customers and potential customers throughout the entire design and development process.
To help get you to stop avoiding it, I've explored six of the most common stupid excuses for not testing your designs and getting feedback early.
Excuse 1: It's a design standard
You can't test every little change you make, right? Can't you sometimes just rely on good design practices and standards? Maybe you moved a button or changed some text. But the problem is, sometimes design standards can get in the way of accomplishing your business goals.
For example, a few months ago at a talk given by Bill Scott, he talked about a developer who had a/b tested the text on a link. One option read, "I'm now on Twitter." The second read, "Follow me on Twitter." The third read, "Click here to follow me on Twitter." Now, anybody familiar with "good design practices" will tell you that you should never, ever use the words "click here" to get somebody to click here. It's SO Web 1.0. But guess which link converted best in the a/b test? That's right. "Click here" generated significantly more Twitter followers than the other two. If that was the business goal, the bad design principle won hands down.
Does this mean that you have to do a full scale usability test every time you change link text? Of course not. Does it mean you have to use the dreaded words "click here" in all your links? Nope. What it does mean is that you should have some way to keep an eye on the metrics you care about for your site, and you should be testing how your design changes affect customer behavior, even when your changes adhere to all the best practices of good design. So, to put it simply: prioritize what you care about and then make sure you test your top priorities.
Excuse 2: Company X does it this way
I can't tell you how many times I've heard, "Oh, we know that will work. Google/Facebook/Apple does it that way." This is the worst kind of cargo cult mentality. While it's true that Google, Facebook, and Apple are all very successful companies, you aren't solving exactly the same problem that those companies are, you don't have exactly the same customers that they do, and you don’t know if they have tested their designs or even care about design in that particular area. You are, hopefully, building an entirely different product, even if it may have some of the same features or a similar set of users.
Is it ok to get design ideas from successful companies? Of course it is. But you still need to make sure your solutions work for your customers.
I previously worked with a company that had a social networking product. Before I joined them, the company decided that, since other companies had had good luck with showing friend updates, they would implement a similar feature, alerting users when their friends updated their profiles or bought products. Unfortunately, the company's users weren't very interested in the updates feature as it was implemented. When we finally asked them why they weren't using the feature, the users told us that they would have been very interested in receiving an entirely different type of update. Of course, if the company had connected with users earlier in the process, they would have rolled the feature out with the right information and gotten a much more positive reaction on launch.
Another thing to remember is that just because a company is successful and has a particular feature doesn't mean it's that exact feature that makes them successful. Google has admitted that the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button loses them page views, but they keep it because they, and their customers, like the feature. That doesn't mean it's a good business plan for your budding search engine startup to adopt a strategy of only providing people with the equivalent of the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. In fact, this is a great example of why you might need to employ multiple testing methods: qualitative (usability, contextual inquiry, surveys), to find out if users find the feature compelling and usable, and quantitative (a/b, analytics), to make sure that the feature doesn't bankrupt you.
The bottom line is, it doesn't matter if something works for another company. If it’s a core interaction that might impact your business or customer behavior, you need to test new features and designs with your customers to make sure that they work for you. Obviously, you also need to make sure that you’re not violating anybody’s IP, but that’s another blog post.
