Dealing with user testing emotions

Almost everyone on every digital product team will agree with you that user testing is important, and yet few companies have a continuous discovery process and few projects have the proper user testing that they deserve.

Among the many logistical reasons why doing user testing can be hard in a given project, there are also a few emotions that the team needs to deal with.

1. Anxiety

Every project has a deadline, and the timeline usually is packed full of requests and actions from all the team members and stakeholders.

Unless your project is built for internal users, guess who’s not at the meeting table to demand an opportunity to put in their thoughts?

Your users.

The anxiety of running the project and managing risks will often make team members make the decision of omitting user testing.

However, this only hightens the anxiety of not knowing if the product is well designed before launch.

Accepting anxiety, team members should allocate time and effort in running user tests during the design process.

2. Fear

The users are more of an unknown quantity than say, the managers, the boss or the client.

When we face the unknown, we experience the emotion of fear.

What if the concept is ill-received? What if the UI is hard to use? What if it presents changes that we really don’t want to deal with right now?

Interestingly, all this fear is going to be present all the way until the product is shipped.

Why not accept the fear, and do user tests so part of the unknown can become known earlier?

3. Embarrassment

The truth sometimes is not kind, and sometimes it could make us lose face.

In a working environment, where people feel like they need to speak with expertise and confidence, it can be hard to admit not knowing something.

And when it is known to others that a mistake is made, or an assumption is wrong, it can feel very embarrassing. So maybe we don’t do user testing.

But knowing that the truth of how the user will use the product is going to eventually come to light, the embarrassment is better dealt within the team before the product is launched.

In the end, these emotions are natural when developing products.

Running a user test to learn more about the user’s behavior, and iterate the design accordingly, will help launch a better product.

And bring joy of success! 🎉🎉