In-house Usability Testing

A brief guide to low budget user testing

Do you really need to get someone else to do usability testing for you?
The short answer is 'no' of course.

You can test usability in-house with employees or you can even go so far as to hire test subjects. You will find a goodly percentage of things wrong with your site, using this kind of lo-fidelity usability testing model.

Now come the cautions: And not all of them come because we are a professional usability company. Some of them come from experience of having been called in after the amateurs had actually made things worse. And some of them come from the fact that we are porfessionals like you, and like you, we value the advantage of professionalism and propriety.

If you conduct your own usability testing, you'll never be sure that you are maximizing the usability of your site and you will never be sure how many users you are losing because of that one small thing that you missed in your test. If you are bent on saving money, there's nothing we can do to help you and we say, "go ahead and do your own usability testing."

Before you do, though, consider these factors:

Having designed or created the interaction, you are already speaking from a personal perspective when you talk to testing subjects. Even if you ask employees to ask usability test subjects about your interaction, the test subjects are going to know they are being talked to by someone with a vested interest in the product. The bottom line here is that they are likely to not want to offend; their comments will likely be watered-down or otherwise skewed.

Objectivity is terribly important when testing anything. When a professional usability testing company runs the usability test, everyone involved is assured that the test is being run as objectively as possible.

More cautions against amateur usability testing
You can come up with your own test questions, or pull some off the internet. You can find good, authoritative sources for these kinds of usability test questions. The advantage to hiring a professional is that they will be aware of the issues that are cropping up on new interactions. Many of the old issues with usability have become standardized and well understood. In addition, there are many newer issues that arise out of the complexities of contemporary technology arising from heightened interactivity, today's variety of mobile devices, higher bandwidth`and numerous other factors. In that case, are you sure that that cheat sheet you found in a Google search is really up-to-date or truly authoritative? Isn't it better to have test questions created by people who have followed trends and seen the effects of changes over several years of experience conducting tests?

When we say it like that, you're sure we are begging the question, but we want to know, are you certain? You need to be sure that it is really worth the time and trouble to conduct an in-house usability test to get results you know are not professional. Like calling a mechanic or hiring a qualified developer or anything else, having your usability testing run by professionals is the right way to do things. Other ways are cheaper but also much riskier.

Now that we got all that out of the way, and you are sure you need to investigate your own usability testing.... please read more in our usability testing guide.

Next: usability testing essentials and conducting an amateur usability test.