"Usability testing provides an unbiased, accurate, and direct examination of your product or website’s user experience. By testing its usability on a sample of actual users who are detached from the amount of emotional investment your team has put into creating and designing the product or website, their feedback can resolve most of your team’s internal debates."
It's risky to blindly hope your website works. It's also too costly; both in the dollars you spent to create your site, and the dollars you lose when it doesn't bring in customers. That's why we were so excited when Hubspot published The Beginner’s Guide to Usability Testing.
Most of us rely on analytics to tell us if our site is achieving its key performance metrics. But, it can be difficult to determine why your site isn't performing even if your analytics clearly tell you that something is broken.
One of the best ways to determine why something is broken (or how something could work better), is to have real people use your site. That's why we've conducted dozens of usability tests for our clients over the years. Here's a nice explanation of how they work from the Hubspot post:
"Usability testing is a method of evaluating a product or website’s user experience. By testing the usability of their product or website with a representative group of their users or customers, UX researchers can determine if their actual users can easily and intuitively use their product or website."
Sound helpful? It is. Usability testing is the best way to understand where your site user experience is broken, and how to fix it.