Usability testing involves evaluating a design's usability with a sample of people who represent the target audience. The gap between what you intended for your users to accomplish and what they really do is what separates your outlook from your actual business.
So, why should you deploy UX research?
A) Markets have a tendency to favorably reward superior designs.
According to a McKinsey study, organisations in the top quartile with the best user experiences and designs had 10% yearly growth, as opposed to the industry's 3-6% average. And this held true across all of the study's industries. Additionally, high performing businesses had an unfair advantage because there was little distinction between the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd quartiles.
B) Your internal staff members know the product too well and intimately.
They are ineligible to test what they have produced because they lack a new customer's perspective, an outside-in viewpoint, and a user's perspective. This occurs as a result of the divergent goals of a client utilising the product and a worker on it. Customers are seeking assistance with their research and purchase goals. Employees within the company are looking for better features, competing with other companies, and emulating the greatest user experience. Most of the time, these two goals are not the same.
C) Customers' conditioned expectations can be at odds with your intuition-based user interface.
The truth is that the major web service providers in the world, like Amazon, have conditioned users to use particular UI elements in particular ways. Even though the claim that an experience may have been better designed is still valid, consumers are only seeking for a certain piece of information in that specific way. An example of this is the 'Save' button, which sports a floppy disk icon despite being a two-decade-old design.
Therefore, having the newest features for your customers should be part of developing top-notch experiences rationally, but intuitively, customers expect something they've already seen and used, which may cause friction.
Good usability research cannot be replaced. It makes sense that there would be doubts about how a test is conducted and this is where Deloitte Digital comes into play.
Deloitte Digital takes charge of creating relevant testing methodologies based on current standards and experience and together with the internal analytics and data team we recommend improvements to help your business reach its targeted KPI’s.