4 risky assumptions you should validate with user testing
By: Tia Peterson
Tags: Product Design, UX Research, UX, Product Management, Ux Strategy

You’ve taken the time to rebuild a navigation model that you believe helps people find something more easily than before. Of course! You are the one who designed it.

You can personally find X more easily. And perhaps your peers can, too (or, more likely, they just trust your word that it’s better now).

But just because you can find X more easily, or your peers can, that doesn’t mean end users will be able to. You should put both designs in front of users, ask them to do something that requires that they find X, observe, and remain neutral on the findings.

Hint: Be careful how you word way-finding questions

Notice that I said you should “ask them to do something that requires that they find X” and not “ask them to find X.” I’ve observed that when you ask someone to “find” something, they hear/read “search” and tend to use the search feature, whereas otherwise they might use navigation.

So it’s better to ask them something (or to do something) specific that requires them to look for the information. For example, “How much does the concert ticket cost?” is a much better user testing question than “Find the price of a concert ticket.”

Assumption #2: People understand what X means (Comprehension)

Do people really understand what they’re looking at? Do they know what those words on the screen mean? Does the label you’ve used mean the same thing to them as it means to you?

How do you know?

Comprehension is an important part of UX design. The meaning of labels, or nomenclature, is not always universal. Sometimes, the labels or words on the screen actually get in the way of what you’re trying to get the user to do.

Testing for comprehension isn’t as simple as asking “what does this mean?” although that is not the worst way to go about it.

You can analyze comprehension by observing how a user goes about completing a task and then asking questions about it. I would always suggesting having them complete the task before getting into their thoughts about it. For example, you can ask them to purchase a ticket using the prototype, and then ask them to rate how easy or hard it was, and then ask them to explain their answer.

Assumption #3: People know what’s clickable and what’s not clickable (Recognition over recollection)

What’s clickable here?

If your design pushes the boundaries of what might be considered normative or breaks several of the Gestalt principles of design, you really ought to put it in front of users and make sure they even know how to use what you’ve designed.

One very easy thing to test is whether or not users can identify the areas in your design that they can interact with. For conversation rate optimization, this is a must-have. But it’s also a must-have for projects with goals related to interactivity.

You may or may not prefer to design obvious clickable elements. But if you’re thinking, “People love to be curious and will spend all day clicking around my page to figure it out,” I’ve got some news for you. No, they won’t.

And just because people have to come to your site and so have learned to use it over time, that does not mean it was designed well. Ideally, you should prioritize recognition over recollection. People should be able to recognize what to do, not just be forced to learn it and memorize it.

Here’s a technique that can help you determine if people are able to determine what’s clickable and what’s not:

Replace all of the content (including link/button text) in your design with lorem ipsum. Replace all icons and imagery with placeholders. You don’t have to remove colors — leave those in! Show the design with placeholder text and imagery to people and ask them to identify what can be clicked. Observe, analyze, and remain neutral about the findings.

What you believe is obvious might not be.

Assumption #4: The new design will improve conversion rate (Effectiveness)

Don’t start dancing… yet.

Finally, you should test any designs that you believe are more effective than previous ones, as that’s the most risky assumption of all. “This works better,” just isn’t sufficient unless proven.

I call this a double assumption. First, there’s an assumption that the old design caused issues. And then that leads to the second assumption which is that the new one is somehow better.

A word to the wise: Test before designing anything at all.

This is something you should do before you even begin design. If you’re asked to redesign something to make it more “effective,” don’t start designing anything without first validating what makes the existing design ineffective in the first place.

Well-intentioned leaders may blame dwindling sales or a dip in a particular KPI on design, possibly because they believe it is easier to control than something like… marketing. And it makes them feel better to do something — anything — that attempts to make things better.

And you yourself may look at a design and think, “Yeah. I can totally see why that doesn’t work!” and get right to work on changing it.

But don’t automatically blame design, specifically web design, for conversion issues.

The product could have been marketed poorly in the first place — put in front of the wrong people at the wrong time for the wrong reasons with the wrong price. Design won’t fix any of those things.

Only after you’ve determined that, in fact, the design is contributing to at least a healthy portion of the reason for poor conversion rate AND have identified specific culprits should you dig into designing something more effective.

Depending on the extent of what you are re-designing, you can use remote user testing to test how well the new design might convert. Or, if you’re only changing one or two pages, you could put up the new page(s) live and send half of your site visitors to those pages, and test conversation rate there (also known as A/B testing).

Either way, before pushing out the new pages/design, validate that it truly is more effective than what you’ve already got.

Make your redesign count

Those of us who love UX research and user testing can become discouraged by the reality of business. Many companies are still in the UX dark ages and often there is just not a lot of time to conduct any research, so designers rely on expertise and past experience to make decisions.

For UX designers, this reality is uncomfortable. UX designers prefer to work directly with users —the humans who are going to be impacted by their work.

The good news is that user testing can done inexpensively, quickly, and can provide enough insight to give you confidence that you’re headed in the right direction with your design. Next time you are asked to redesign or improve something, ask for the resources to validate your assumptions and confirm that you’re on the right path.