Usability Testing - expensive. User Feedback - priceless.

Michele writes how he and his colleagues were wondering why so many customers (they run a hosting company in Ireland) called in to find out how to pay their bills online. It turned out that the link for online-payments, which had been in their interface for a long time, was just hidden too well. So Michele asks: Usability Testing - Worth The Investment?

Making sure to listen to your clients and giving existing users the opportunity to provide feedback is worth more than any user testing in the world.

Usability testing usually starts off with an assumption that you know your customer base, but do you really? What if you attract different users than intended, who end up using your product differently than intended?

In one of my previous jobs, I was able to attend a usability testing session in a downtown Toronto office building. I think the people testing the product were picked based on user profiles of the new service. In the example I am talking about, it turned out that the users that ended up coming to the site, were quite different from the users that were tested earlier. Also, as far as I could tell, barely any of the lessons learned resulted in changes to the website.

That is not to say that user testing is useless. It can be a very valuable exercise if done right and with the right users. You will always come across something that you had not thought of before. Never think about your product from your own perspective, put yourself in someone else’s shoes. You know too much about your own products for your own good. Do you know your users?