Companies find success faster through usability testing

The Situation

Companies want to build product features as fast as possible, so that they can deliver value to their customers, generate sales, and capture narrow windows of opportunity.

A Sub-Optimal Choice

In order to speed up product development, some companies skip the usability testing process. Instead, they rely on developers to build the product features, and then they release them to production. This approach is sub-optimal because it slows down product teams by forcing developers to fix UX issues when they're already in production.

The Costs of Skipping Usability Testing:

Skipping usability testing forces software companies to rework product features using many of the same stakeholders involved in the initial product developement process.

Companies need to reinvest human capital from the following stakeholders:

• Product managers
• UX designers
• Developers
• QA engineers
• Customer support

Work that may have to be redone includes:

• Product requirements
• User research
• User flows
• Wireframes
• Visual designs
• Code
• Test cases
• Documentation

Skipping the usability process results in large human capital costs that could have been avoided if the usability testing process had been completed.

Skipping the usability process also results in tremendous opportunity costs beyond human capital. It also slows down product development and prevents companies from having proactive product strategy.

Redesigning product features costs businesses their ability to innovate. Businesses need to provide some level of support for existing products, so building the wrong features inevitably costs companies time and energy to maintain existing features.

Building the wrong features also hurts employee morale and their company retention. This has material effects on the business.

The Solution

User testing is one of the most important steps in the software development process. It allows developers to see how real users interact with their software and identify any potential problems.

Skipping user testing can have serious consequences for software companies. Without user testing, companies are more likely to release software with serious bugs and usability problems. This can lead to customer dissatisfaction, loss of sales, and damage to the company's reputation.

User testing is not a luxury – it's a necessity. Any software company that wants to be successful should make sure to include it in their development process.