Usability testing is one the most accepted ways for identifying usability issues of digital products and services. The premise of this article is, that usability testing is not just good for fixing problems, but it can actually drive your creative process.

What is proactive usability testing?

Proactive usability testing is about constantly testing (and improving) whatever you’re working on, while you’re working on it, whether you’re a website owner, designer or developer.
Link: Why Userbrain is different from other usability testing services

The idea behind proactive usability testing is best described with an example:

Imagine you work in a web design agency and want to create a website for one of your clients. For whatever reason you and your client want to perform some usability testing. Here’s what usually happens. After starting your design process you immediately jump into building mode (which is good), but instead of testing early mockups and prototypes, you decide to finish the whole website, and only test it after it’s done.

This way your website might be done, but it’s also full of usability issues, you’ll then need to fix ASAP. The solution to this problem is usually either to call in some usability expert, or to pay for usability testing websites like UserTesting.com.

I’d like to call this kind of behavior on-demand testing, and it’s the most common way of doing usability tests right now. Proactive usability testing on the other hand doesn’t wait until something’s done, but rather drives your creative process with continuos feedback from real people.

How does it work?

Proactive usability testing is very straight forward. Instead of building something only on the behalf of some genius idea you change your workflow to manifest the essence of this idea in a “working” prototype as fast as possible, for the sole purpose of testing it with real people.

Since you’re typically still in the beginning (or at least not the end) of a project, when you start testing proactively, you are not resistant to newly identified problems, but actually look forward to negative usability feedback, in order to improve your current solution.

At Simplease we often refer to this way of testing as test-driven design because it’s not just about identifying problems, but really drives our design process. That said, I want to give you one more example to describe how proactive usability testing can benefit you in real-world projects.

Imagine you’re working in a startup and are responsible for designing a completely new user interface for one of your company’s products. Where should you start? There are a lot of wrong answers to this questions. There’s also one that I personally think to be true:

You have to build a testable prototype as soon as possible.

I’m not talking about mockups and screenshots for sharing with your colleagues. While this kind of feedback is useful and absolutely has it’s place, it’s no substitute for testing your design with people outside your team.

One way of doing this, is by using for example Balsamiq for sketching, InVision for turning these sketches into click-prototypes, and our service, Userbrain for testing the exported HTML prototypes with random web users. Another way would be to test your prototype in Skype meetings, or even print them out to do some live testing.

It’s not important how exactly you will do it. The only thing that matters, is that you create a testing schedule, and commit to it under any circumstances (even if you’ve got nothing new to test or feel like you already know enough about your current design).

Why you need a schedule? Because proactive usability testing is focused on long-term goals and therefore has to become a habit, which is only possible if you really stick to it.

Why it’d be smart to make it a habit?

As I’ve mentioned in the beginning, proactive usability testing can drive your creative process. In order to understand how, it’s useful to read the original paper on using the RITE method to improve products [PDF], written by the team at Microsoft that used it to develop the popular game Age of Empires II:

Development and design resources are scarce, and when faced with the
decision between fixing a “working” feature or putting another feature in the product, the choice is often made to add the new feature.

We all know this to be true. Here’s another good bit from the RITE paper, on why usability feedback needs to be available when decision are made, and not afterwards:

Feedback that is available when product feature decisions are being made is far more likely to be taken into account than that which arrives after the decisions have already been made. The delay between when a feature is implemented and when usability feedback is delivered to the team is a barrier to those recommendations being used.

Similar to the RITE method, proactive usability testing suggests that designers and developers should test their own products. This paradigm shift won’t be suitable in every situation, but it’s definitely worth a try for people who believe that design and usability are ultimately two sides of the same coin.

You can’t understand usability without mastering design and you can’t master design without understanding usability. Both need to happen in parallel and that’s why designers need to do user tests.
Link: Why designers should do usability tests

If you’re interested in proactive usability testing, or maybe you have already turned it into a habit to regularly test your designs, I’d be more than happy to read your thoughts, ideas, and experiences on this topic.