Think Cost & Benefits of Doing User Testing in the Best Way

In one of our design team planning meetings, we discussed usability testing for a feature.

I asked if this feature would be used often, and it turned out to be a rarely used feature. Coming from a background of being the one-person UX team in my past companies, I immediately questioned whether this would be worth it using UserTesting.com costing $49+ per user. So I threw that idea out and said how about testing with our family and friends instead.

My manager replied: “No, if we compare the efficiency of getting users from User Testing versus getting friends, setting things up, it’s not worth it. If this were your own small startup, saving money on that makes sense. However, since we have the budget and we should get this done quickly, we should go for the methods that are more efficient. Of course there are many solutions on market that may be easier and better, probably less costly than UserTesting.com, we can try to find the best way to fit our own testing.”

This made me think. The companies I’ve worked at didn’t have much budget for user testing. I was struggling with that, and we always tried to work around ways to cut the cost. This resulted in very low efficiency to get tasks done. I still have that mindset, which was the reason why it was so natural for me to think about the cost first thing.

Now that I’m in a very different environment, it’s time to switch mindset. Utilize resources & budgets that we are supposed to utilize, and this will make our work better and faster.

 

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