User Experience encompasses many different parts. In order to analyze the success of your designs, you’ll need to understand each one of these parts and test them with real users.

User Testing

User Experience encompasses many different parts. In order to analyze the success of your designs, you’ll need to understand each one of these parts and test them with real users. 

UX parts:

• Useful: Does your product have a practical purpose? The more people need it, the better the experience will be.  

• Usable: Are people able to use your product to complete their purpose? It is complicated and confusing, or easy to understand and follow?

• Desirable: Did you do a great job with imagery and branding identity? Did you make users want to come back and/or recommend it to friends? 

• Findable: Can users locate features and content easily, or do they need to roam around and try to find how to do certain operations?

• Accessible: Did you make sure to consider accessibility when designing the pages? Do you have proper use of alt text for images, structured hierarchy for content so users can recognize headers from paragraphs and did you consider contrast of colors?

• Credible: Do users trust your brand? Does the design convey a credible source where one would trust you with their personal data and credit card number?

• Valuable: do users gain value from your product or service? 
  

While you may hire rock stars (like us), do not assume that you can skip testing. Very experienced UX designers are still human and we design for other humans. That means we need to test and verify that our designs are intuitive, and that all users of all skill levels may get through point A to B and that our designs answer all the UX points above (useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, credible and valuable). Every UX problem may have a handful of solutions, and testing ensures we selected the correct one. 

Baseline Testing

We often suggest our clients to conduct baseline testing. This means testing the current running application and gaining insights to users’ pain points. While we can pre-identify what those areas might be, baseline testing allows us to hear it from the source and listen to what the users have to say about it, before applying any fixes. Baseline testing is also a great tool to help set up an ongoing project plan for the year, and set priorities based on findings, rather than opinions. Whenever possible, let the users do the talking.