Your marketing team wants to showcase campaigns, content teams want the latest blog posts displayed, and the senior stakeholder thinks the company mission statement should be prominent. Everything needs to be on the homepage, above the fold. But what do your users actually want?
A core challenge in all website projects is managing conflicting viewpoints and understanding what users genuinely need from your website. User testing provides a key step in investigating opinions and discovering evidence-based insights.
Creating Clarity
Conducting robust user testing gives your teams the insights they need to reveal the intricate usability issues that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. When testing shows users want to interact with a key feature but can't, that becomes the shared priority to improve. When testing highlights a function goes completely unused and unwanted, you can confidently deprioritise it. When insights uncover that users need something nobody had considered, your team aligns around addressing that genuine need.
We've found that showing stakeholders video clips of real users struggling provides immediate clarity. You can spend weeks explaining why a contact us form is confusing, or you can show a two-minute clip of someone unable to select the dropdown link and abandoning the form at the same step three other people were unable to complete. Suddenly, everyone's on the same page. The opinions become evidence, and debates shift to a shared understanding of what needs to change.
Getting Started with User Testing
When conducting user testing, there are a number of techniques to get the most from your research depending on your project's needs and budget. Popular methods we use include:
Moderated testing involves a facilitator guiding participants through tasks in real time. This gives you the richest insights as you can ask follow-up questions, probe deeper when users struggle, and observe their genuine reactions. It's particularly valuable when you need to understand the 'why' behind user behaviour.
Unmoderated testing allows participants to complete tasks independently whilst being recorded. It's faster, more natural to participants and cost effective for straightforward usability checks, though you'll miss the opportunity to dig deeper into unexpected behaviours during the testing.
Prototype testing lets you validate designs before development begins. Using interactive prototypes, you can test user flows and catch fundamental issues whilst they're still cheap and quick to fix.
Task-based testing focuses on specific goals—'Get in contact' or 'Sign up to the newsletter'. This approach reveals whether your site's structure and navigation support what users need to accomplish.
Testing with the right people ensures recommendations are bespoke to your real users' needs, so participants should be recruited to genuinely represent your users based on relevant demographics, interests, educational level, career background, and digital confidence. Including users with accessibility needs such as visual impairments or neurodiverse conditions can ensure experiences are inclusive, giving you confidence that insights are tailored to your website and users.
Understanding Unconscious Behaviour
Observing unconscious behaviour is what makes user testing particularly insightful. People have a habit of not always explaining or understanding their own behaviour on a website. They might insist they read every word on the navigation when eye tracking shows they scanned the first two links and lost interest after that. They'll claim a process was "easy" while video playback reveals them backtracking and missing the big flashing button.
Tools like eye tracking allow us to clearly observe unconscious behaviour, and understand what users actually experience, not what they think they experience or what they think you want to hear. Instead of debating whether users will notice an important call-to-action, you can see precisely where their eyes go and how long they spend looking at each section of the page.
User testing doesn't tell you whose opinion was right. It replaces those opinions with evidence, showing everyone what users actually need and do on your website, giving your entire team a shared understanding to build from. This is how websites move from reflecting internal debates to delivering experiences that work for users-and we can help you get there.
