You've spent months designing the perfect product. Yet, when users encounter it, it's a cold shower: incomprehension, frustration, abandonment. Furthermore, design errors can cost a fortune in development and marketing. User testing is supposed to prevent this disaster by allowing you to validate your choices and identify areas for improvement. But how can you ensure they reveal the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? User testing is your product's life insurance, an essential investment to minimize risks and maximize success. But beware: biased tests can skew all your decisions, leading you to costly dead ends. How can you guarantee reliable results and maximize your return on investment? This article offers a practical guide to avoiding the 7 most common pitfalls when implementing user testing.
1. Neglecting participant recruitment
Selecting your testers is the first step in ensuring relevant feedback. If your participants don't match your target audience, their feedback won't be representative.
???? How to recruit well?
- Define your people : Who are the users you are targeting?
- Prioritize key profiles : Not all users are equally important for your test.
- Writing a good screener : A clear and precise pre-selection questionnaire is essential for filtering candidates.
- Check profiles : Before and at the beginning of the test, ask a few background questions to ensure that the participant is a good fit for your target audience.
💡 Example : You're testing a dog training app. If your tester doesn't have a dog and doesn't want one, their opinion won't be very useful since they won't be able to imagine themselves in the situation.
2. A poorly designed scenario
Writing a test scenario may seem simple, but the exercise often requires careful thought and several iterations. The scenario must be easy for the user to understand: the words shouldn't be overly complicated, but they should also be evocative for our target audience. It should invite the user to perform one or more tasks without making them too explicit. In real life, no one explores a website or app without a specific goal.
???? How to build a good scenario?
- Use simple and understandable words for your target.
- Formulate a realistic and engaging situation rather than an artificial task.
- Don't give not too many indications, so as not to influence behavior.
💡 Example :
❌ “Try the app and tell us what you think.”
✅ “You're coming back from a difficult walk with your dog and looking for tips on how to train him. You come across this app. What do you do?”
With this type of contextualization, the user projects themselves and acts more naturally. Behind this, you will need to identify the tasks underlying this scenario: using the search bar, using filters, reading an article or video, etc.
3. A moderator who influences user testing
Facilitating a user test is much more than just asking questions! The moderator must pay attention to:
- His words: their understanding, their relevance at the right time, their kindness, their objectivity
- His animation guide: unroll it in its entirety, ask all the questions, have the participant carry out the different tasks
- Respect the timing
- Be exhaustive in your note-taking: the declarative, the behavioral, the tester's reactions, etc.
- ...
With all these things to manage simultaneously, and depending on our fatigue or state of mind at the time of the test, we can quickly let go of our attitude, even completely unconsciously. The risk is that this will influence the participant and that they will want, through confirmation, for example, to conform to what they perceived of us.
???? The secret? Training!
With practice, we learn to ask the right follow-up questions, to reformulate in a neutral manner and to manage the unexpected.
💡 Special case : If a participant makes comments that are contrary to your values, it is better to remain neutral or, if necessary, politely shorten the test.
4. Note-taking that is too focused on the declarative
Too often, note-taking during user testing is limited to transcribing what participants say. Yet, silences, hesitations, facial expressions, and body language are a wealth of valuable information. Sometimes, they can even reveal the essence of what our user would like to convey but finds it harder to verbalize.
???? How to take good notes?
Develop active listening and attentive observation skills, taking into account all aspects of communication. Practice deciphering nonverbal cues, noting variations in tone, behaviors, and facial expressions, and cross-referencing them with the actual words spoken. This comprehensive approach will allow you to better understand users' true reactions and identify sticking points or sources of frustration that aren't always expressed verbally.
💡 Example :
One user claims that "everything was clear," but he clicked three times in the wrong place and seemed annoyed. His behavior says the opposite of his words: there's a problem to be explored!
5. Jumping to conclusions
After each user test, it's always very interesting to note your feelings and what you remember from it. But be careful not to fall into the trap of drawing hasty conclusions! Indeed, we are inevitably subject to confirmation bias, which pushes us to favor, search for, interpret, and remember information that confirms or supports our own pre-existing beliefs, values, or hypotheses, and to ignore or minimize the importance of information that contradicts them. This bias, linked to selective perception, could cause us to miss details, which ultimately do not make it into our analysis.
???? Best practices in analysis
✔️ Collect and compare several testimonies before concluding
✔️ Organize returns by themes and trends
✔️ Cross-reference declarative and actual behavior (reactions, time spent on a task, etc.)
✔️ Prioritize actions to be taken based on their impact on the user experience and their feasibility
Only once these steps have been completed will it be worthwhile to review your notes taken immediately after each test and compare them to your analysis. They may allow you to see your study from a different perspective, to complete your analysis, or perhaps simply to realize that your brain has been playing tricks on you and that if you had trusted your initial intuitions, you would have been wrong.
💡 Example :
During testing, your users react very positively to the neat design of your application: “It’s super beautiful!”, “It makes you smile, these are colors that inspire joy.”. This enthusiastic feedback might suggest a successful user experience. But as you observe their navigation, you notice that they struggle to find certain features or don't fully understand the content. The pitfall here is that relying solely on users' enthusiasm without delving into their challenges can lead to a false impression of success. The app is visually appealing, but its usability needs improvement to deliver a smooth and intuitive experience.
6. Neglecting the deliverable and communication of results
The outcome of user testing isn't limited to the analysis phase. Too often, the results remain confined to the UX team, without being shared with the design and development teams, or without leading to concrete improvement actions. This neglect renders testing useless and deprives the company of a valuable return on investment. What good will these tests have been if they haven't advanced the overall thinking on the subject, if they haven't led to decisions being made about the product being tested?
????Take care of the communication and follow-up phase
- Adapt the format to the audience (email, slide, video, workshop, etc.)
- Adapt the tone used (more formal with higher hierarchical levels than with your office colleague)
- Highlight key insights
- Propose actionable recommendations
This collaborative and proactive approach will maximize your chances of transforming user testing insights into concrete improvements and creating a user-centric culture within your company. And the added bonus: it'll be even more rewarding for you!
💡 Example : A developer doesn't need a long report. A visual summary with screenshots and concrete points for improvement will be much more useful.
7. Go all out on AI
AI offers great tools that will save you a lot of time, especially if you are new to user testing.
???? AI can assist you on :
- Writing a recruitment screener
- Automatic note taking
- Sorting and categorizing returns
However, AI does not currently replace the experience, critical thinking and analytical skills you have as a human. This is not the place to go into detail on how to use AI for research and user testing, as it is a field that is constantly evolving and improving: the findings made today may no longer be so tomorrow. The advice, certainly general, but which will remain valid (at least for the coming months and years) is to always remain a safeguard: Use AI as you would an intern or an apprentice who would assist you (and even greatly!) with part of the work, but don't trust him blindly.
💡 Example : During a test, you notice that a participant pauses slightly before clicking, frowns slightly, or hesitates with their fingertip on the screen. This brief moment of hesitation may reveal doubt or misunderstanding. As a moderator, you can then intervene: “What made you hesitate at that moment?”. An artificial intelligence could analyze the words spoken, but it would not capture these micro-hesitations or be able to interpret them in the overall context of the test. Your human perspective remains essential to go beyond the declarative and dig into what the user does not always spontaneously verbalize.
By avoiding these common mistakes, you're not just improving your user testing. You're investing in the quality of your product, the satisfaction of your users, and the long-term success of your business. Well-conducted user testing is a real growth driver: it allows you to reduce development costs by avoiding costly mistakes, increase product adoption by addressing real user needs, and strengthen customer loyalty by delivering an exceptional experience. So, don't think of user testing as just another step in your design process; think of it as a strategic investment for a future where the user is at the heart of your success.
Florine AUFFRAIT, UX Designer @UX-Republic
