User testing is an essential step to ensure your product succeeds, but knowing when to incorporate it can be tricky to decide. Gaining feedback at any stage is always beneficial in the long run, as every stage of the product cycle offers unique opportunities to learn from users. Below are some pointers about what you'll discover at different stages and how to use that to your advantage.
Before You Start Designing
Starting a redesign project can be daunting. You've got old insights competing for importance on the new website, research from years ago that conflicts with recent data, and a team struggling to align on what the current experience does well and what needs fixing.
Putting the website in front of real users and observing their actual problems gives your project the kickstart it needs. It ensures users are at the heart of the redesign from day one, not an afterthought once decisions have already been made.
Projects often start with strict requirements that suddenly shift once you explore what's really needed from the new experience. Testing the existing site reveals which assumptions were accurate and which were based on outdated information or internal preferences rather than user behaviour.
During the Design Phase
This is where testing prevents expensive mistakes. Before developers write any code, you can build interactive prototypes that look and feel real enough to test properly. Users click through, attempt tasks, and reveal problems whilst fixing them is still straightforward.
Remember that service comparison tool from our last post? That would have been caught in this phase, saving the cost and poor user experience[CP1] of launching with a critical flaw that misled users.
New projects come with lots of unknowns and conflicting opinions about what will work best. Testing variations of key features, whether it's two different navigation approaches or alternative checkout flows gives you the evidence needed to make confident decisions.
Prototypes fail fast and cheap. It's better to discover a navigation structure doesn't work when it takes an hour to revise than when it requires developers weeks to fix.
After You Launch
Review and refinement is a critical step to constantly improve user experience on your website, and new websites are no different. Testing after launch allows you to catch any micro usability issues which could have been created whilst trying to solve the larger goals for the project.
Real users in real situations will always surprise you. They'll use your site on devices you didn't test. They'll have questions you didn't anticipate. They'll find creative ways to misunderstand instructions you thought were crystal clear.
The insights you gather become your roadmap for what to prioritise next. Instead of guessing which issues matter most, you'll have evidence of what's actually causing problems and how often.
Testing Isn't Optional, It's Strategic
Projects that skip testing don't save time, they move important decisions further down the road whilst they get more expensive and more complicated to fix. If you're wondering whether your project needs testing, the answer is probably yes. If you're wondering when to do it, the answer is sooner rather than later, and possibly more than once.
Testing existing sites shows you what to fix. Testing designs shows you if your solution works. Testing live sites shows you what to improve next. Want to create digital experiences that truly work for your users? Discover how we optimise digital customer experiences through user-centred research and testing.
