10 silly objections for not performing user testing

Do you think that life as a UX designer is easy? Let me tell you, no, it’s not. 

Demanding clients that tell you they want a chicken and it turns out they want a spaceship, managers that fancy a better-looking product, but literally do not give a *** for the UX of it, developers pointing fingers at you for that little incremental change you made in the design (which makes them rewrite the whole code for the 10th time) and you somewhere in the middle blaming yourself for deciding to follow the UX path. You are not alone.

[Beware, PROMOTION incoming] Useberry was born for exactly this reason: to make UX designers’ lives easier.

Anyway, here’s the thing. User testing is a no-brainer and you know that as much as I do. 

But it seems that this fact is not crystal clear to everyone in the room.

We have all heard them. Maybe not every single one of them but definitely some or variations of them. Here’s a list of the top 10 silly objections you (me, he, she, they, actually every UX designer out there) have heard when you tried to convince your manager that you need to test your prototypes:

They will steal our idea  🦹‍♂️

Oh, that’s huge. This is the “everyone is chasing me” syndrome that not only startups tend to have but also SMEs. First of all, nobody will ever steal your idea by just viewing it. Period. Secondly, if your company is big enough to have such sophisticated designs, you will surely have access to users that you can trust; if it is not, you don’t have to worry about it anyway. Third, NDA paper.

We will come out as amateurs 🤷‍♂️

Okay, from all the objections stated here, this seems to have at least a single drop of rationale. But, think about that for a second: is it better to disappoint a small hypothetical audience or your whole actual audience?

We want to surprise our users 🎁

Here’s a quick fact for that: users hate surprises. They really do. You could state the following if faced with this objection: “I can tell you very safely that if you truly surprise your users, 99% of the time you will find out that they have a different idea from you because they are not you.”

[Enter your own name] you are the expert, it is your job to do it 🕵️‍♂️

The most common objection, yet the most unprofessional. If your boss/manager/coworker points at you like that, do yourself a favor and leave the company immediately.

We cannot afford to do user testing 💸

Long gone are the days when user testing was a luxury, to only be afforded by the top-notch, data-driven, big-pocket companies. You no longer have to invest your time, energy, or money in booking audiences, offices, psychologists, etc. Remote user testing has made it super easy for us to the point that we just copy-paste our design’s link, send it to our audience, and just see the magic happen.

We don’t do that here  👵

At least they are straight with you from the beginning. The question is do you want to be “here” (which probably is 1984)?

We’ve done it in the past and it’s not worth the investment  💰

This is not that bad of an objection because it leaves some room for debate. So, first of all, you have to make it clear that you know what you are doing and, most importantly, why you are doing it. User testing is important but you need to elaborate a little bit more when talking to professionals that don’t belong in the UX industry. You need to point out that user research and user testing will make all parties happy (the ones discussed in the intro) with the trade-off being some $ that you will pay for the usage of the user testing web app. You will save developers precious time, you will make your clients or your stockholders happy, and you will launch the product much faster. All that by just validating your hypotheses in your designs or prototypes.

If Ford asked people what they wanted, they would answer better horses  🏇🏽

This is what perfectionists tend to say. It should not be seen in a bad way. The question is how you are going to leave the company: with a car or with a horse.

Manager/Boss/Anyone: I belong to the desired audience. Let’s do this!  👨‍🏫  👨‍⚕️  👨‍🚀

You don’t have to be a psychologist to realize that people that are directly related to something tend to be biased. Thus, even in the unlikely scenario that the manager is a serial passionate client that represents the company’s audience the results of a potential user interview will not yield anything of significance to be used in the optimization of the product.

No need to do that now. Let’s launch and get insights from our user’s feedback (Aka lean startup) 🎯

Guys, I admit that I was completely judgemental in this article but the last objection is more of a strategy thing. You need to sit down and discuss with your managers an alternative strategy where user testing will precede the product’s launch. The benefits are so clear that I really do not need to spend time writing them.