Why We Test

We've been doing this job for awhile now; some of us for longer than we care to admit. And over the years we've gotten pretty good at it. So, in most cases, we feel like we have a pretty good idea of what our clients need and how to make it work for them. Still, we always encourage them the include user testing as part of the design process. "Why," they often ask. "You guys are experts in user experience and nobody knows my business better than I do. What are we going to learn from putting a bunch of novices in front of a prototype that we can't figure out for ourselves?" The answer is often not fulfilling to them: "We don't know."

But that's the truth; we don't know. We think it's going to work. We think that your customers are going to act in rational, predictable ways. We think that they all want the same things for the same reasons. But they never do. On some level, tests always fail. And that's by design. Because we never learn anything when things go right. We only start learning when we start struggling. It's then that we can understand motivations, see priorities, and gauge meddle. And after it breaks we have a chance to fix it. We can pick ourselves up and move forward with a renewed direction and enthusiasm—for now we know something that we didn't know before. Now we know something that we didn't even know we needed to know.

And that's why we test. Because it's better to reveal your weaknesses while you can still do something about them. The goal is to fail, just a little.