• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Marco & Bee

Consulting | Publishing | Recruiting

The importance of understanding “will” vs. “can” in usability testing

July 19, 2015 by Brian Hoadley Leave a Comment

The importance of understanding “will” vs. “can” in usability testing

In my experience it never fails that many stakeholders come to usability testing with the question of “will” vs. “can” Customers use their products or services.

It’s a natural and desirable outcome of conducting user research. A positive answer can lead to acceptance of a business case, sign-off on a product launch, or pre-mature glory for the product owner and team.

A negative answer can help to avert a disastrous build and launch.

Unfortunately, there isn’t really any valid means to discern from usability testing whether or not a Customer “will” use a product or service. And if your research points to that outcome, you should be wary and question the premise of the research.

What usability testing does help with is determining whether or not Customers “can” use your products or services. This type of research is focused more on task completion, the time it takes to complete tasks, the ability to navigate scenarios or journeys and come to a satisfying (if successful) or dissatisfying (if the Customer is unable to complete or adequately navigate a journey) ending.

Usability testing is an excellent method of identifying issues in an existing or live journey, or helping to improve and iterate designs at a point when changes can be made and the costs of development have yet to be incurred.

Usability testing, by its very nature, is about determining if something is usable or not and how to improve it – not if someone “will” use it, but “can” they use it.

Think about it this way. If Jeff Bezos had conducted usability testing to determine if people “will” buy books online in 1994, we might not have Amazon.com. I remember the scepticism of people when Amazon launched. Sometimes your product or service requires a leap of faith, luck, timing, or identification of a gap in the market that users never realised was needed – something that usability testing won’t give you, but other forms of research will help to identify.

It’s important to understand this distinction when engaging with user research so that you have realistic expectations of the process and outcome, and that you set the correct expectations with stakeholders in your organisation.

Usability testing is an incredibly powerful research tool when you know which questions you are trying to answer – and it can be incredibly disappointing when you unknowingly ask the wrong questions.

This is the first of a number of posts I’ll write over time on my thoughts of user research methods in the digital space.

Filed Under: Product and Service Design

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Categories

  • Conference/Events
  • Organisational Design
  • Product and Service Design
  • Storytelling

Recent Posts

  • A World of Increasing Expectation: 10x Engineers and Unicorn Designers
  • When transforming your organisation, who should lead your value streams?
  • Navigating Design in Transformation
  • Understanding the importance of environment on People and Culture
  • Can innovation teams create innovation in organisations that aren’t design-led?

Archives

  • March 2020
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • November 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • May 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • March 2009

© 2023 Marco & Bee Limited