Need of Testing in UI/UX

Following are the reasons on why do we need Testing in UI/UX designing process:

• Iterative Design: Not even the best of the best designers gets it right in the first go. even they can’t design a good user experience without iterative design driven by observations of real users. This make usability design an essential step in any good designer’s workflow.
• Finding Design Issues: Imagine this scenario. Your team designed a website, and they asked you to create a new feature that will allow customers to place orders on the website. You have created a prototype of the website that includes this new feature to place an online order. But how would you know the imperfections and mistakes you made in you design, for that you will have to conduct a usability study, gather feedback and improve those aspects of your design. The earlier you realize your mistakes as a designer, the better the design comes out. And you can only know those mistakes by getting a review from another designer, which may be costly, or simply getting it tested by the people who will thereafter also use your final product.
• Knowing the User: Usability testing is a great way to get to know the people you’re designing for. You can get a better sense of how your specific users see the world and what they want from your designs. These insights only help your website but also you to grow as a designer.
• Gathering user Observations: Usability testing is a great way to collect observations from users about your application or website. Observations about where do people get stuck? what confuses them? What errors do they run into? These insights are helpful before we release the application or website or rollout a new version. Always remember, user centricity is the key to a great design.
• Giving Users What Users Want: During creating new features, you as a designer might have your best intensions for the customers but only they know what they want. No matter how great the concept or the design is, customers will only use stuff that they actually need. UI/UX testing allows us to find a balance between what the business want, what you can deliver as a designer and what the user wants.
• Saves Resources and Time: UI/UX testing is very useful for saving the capital and human resources for a company. A feature that is anyways not effective and not going to be used by the customers can be discontinued rather than wasting time and resources on it. Another way in which UI/UX testing saves resources and time is that designers get to know their mistakes early, and those are immediately worked upon rather than realizing it during rollout and losing valuable customers.

In this fast-happening world, every business and every team wants to release the next update or the next application as soon as possible, because of this teams or UI/UX designers often miss out on a very important thing – properly testing the design. But why does this even matter? who focuses on testing anyways? can the users not give us feedback after release rather than taking feedback through testing? These are the questions designers ask and in this article, we will answer these questions.

In this article, we will discuss the need for testing in UI/UX, why it is so important, and why you must add it to your UI/UX workflow if you haven’t. But before that, we will start from the basics about what Usability testing or UI/UX testing is.