It’s not very hard to find a user experience (UX) designer to pick you about testing your designs with your actual clients. The problem here is not all business owners are well versed with the benefits of user testing and at times it gets really hard for professional website design agencies in Dubai to persuade them to leap into one.

Let me get specific here about why user testing is by far the best testing method available, especially for web businesses. You see, user testing allows you to capture those devilish issues as well that hasn’t happened to you yet. User testing is basically a way to be there when it happens.

How testing saves the day?

We will understand this with an example. Let’s consider a case where the client needed a sign up on his website. Now there can be different ways to ask your prospect audience to sign up on your website. One way could be a simple lead form that requires them to fill in their details, other could be a simple newsletter subscription or may be a discount voucher deal. To see which one is the most effective, a real-time testing mechanism with each of the option rolled out to a sample audience picked from your real-time consumer segment will aid invariably.

User testing provides focus to stakeholder’s feedback

Don’t worry much about walking to your client with a few unsolved problems. You cannot humanly solve all the issues at one time. The goal here is to show your design and make clear what needs to be fixed on priority and why. By testing and explaining the problems you have found, you can include your stakeholders in taking key decisions.

Don’t make it optional

It’s not unusual to look at the total sum in a proposal and go, umm. This might be a little too much. So what typically happens? Things that don’t seem essential get trimmed. That usability lab test becomes optional and we convince ourselves that we will somehow persuade the client later than the usability test is actually important. But how do you convince them that something you made optional a couple of months ago, is now really important? The client will likely feel that we are trying to sell them something they don’t really need.

Clarify the objective, not the procedure

A usability lab test with five people often produces valuable but costly insight. It also requires resources that don’t go into the test itself. For example, recruiting and rewarding test that subjects rigging your lab and observation room, making sure the observers from the client are well taken care of.

Scale down documentation instead of testing

If you think testing takes too much time, it might be because you spend too much time documenting the test. In a lab test, it’s a good idea to have 20 to 30 minutes between each test subject. This gives you time to summarize (and maybe even fix) the things you found in each test before you move on to the next subject. By the end of the day, you have a to-do list. No need to document it any more than that.

Testing is designing

As I hope I’ve demonstrated, user testing doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. So what stops us? Personally, I’ve met two big hurdles: building testing into projects, to begin with, and making a habit out of doing the work.

The critical first step is to make sure that some sort of user testing is part of the approved project plan. A project manager will look at the proposal and make sure we tick that off the list. Eventually, maybe your clients will come asking for it: “But wasn’t there supposed to be some testing in this project.

Second, you don’t have to ask for anyone’s permission to test. User testing improves not only the quality of our work, but also the communication within teams and with stakeholders. If you’re tasked with designing something, even if you have just a few days to do it, treat testing as a part of that design task. I’ve suggested a couple of ways to do that, even with limited time and funds, and I hope you’ll share even more tips, tricks, and tools in the comments. In order to take a complete picture of how can user testing help in improving your website design, get in touch with a local website design agency in Dubai for a detailed info-session.