If you work in a product team, I’m sure that putting your users first is your main priority. Am I right?

I’m also sure that every product decision, every backlog prioritization and every conversation with stakeholders is around making sure you are building exactly what your customers want and need. Am I right?

But how do you know you are building the right product and experience?

By running user testing sessions. But sometimes the day-to-day duties don’t let us put our solution in front of our customers and learn from them. Am I right?

Good news though. You are not alone. User testing remains one of the top challenges SaaS designers face in their current UX process.

Why it is so hard to consistently run user tests?

There are a few reasons why some product teams don’t run user tests because:

• They don’t have enough time: The day-to-day in startups is hectic. There are plenty of things to do, internal meetings to attend and strict deadlines to attend. Sometimes, UX and product designers spend a lot of time generating concepts, iterating and discussing them that they don’t have time to test with customers.
  

• It is a very time-consuming process: finding the users, managing schedules, running the tests, analyzing results and compensating them afterward is a very time-consuming task.
  

• Finding the right user is hard: this is especially true on B2B startups. It is hard (and sometimes expensive) to find the right user to test my solution with.

Why it is important to run user tests?

Helps you understand the why

Hearing and seeing how they use your software from your users can give you validation on why they do things in a particular way. As a result, you can iterate and design a product based on what feedback your users give you.

Improve user retention

By understanding how your customers are using your product and what problems do they have, you can iterate and build a solution that fits their workflow and helps them be successful with your solution.  

Remove internal discussions

When you’re too close to your product, you don’t notice what isn’t working because you lack a fresh perspective. It happens to everyone. You’re too close to it and too familiar. Cue: your users! They can give you the fresh eyes you need to wake you up to something that needs attention. Not a bad way to create some brand loyalty, either.

Reduce development cost and time

Engineering hours go up when user testing isn't a thing. That’s right, developers can spend up to 50% of their time fixing issues that could have been uncovered through a user test.

Conclusion

As you can see, investing in user tests has a major impact on your product, and your business. With Usernova you can create targeted user testing sessions and get video recordings from your own customers while using your product. Try it now for free!