Toptal

The Importance of User Testing

Apple and Microsoft haven’t always hit it out of the park with their product releases.

Microsoft’s Windows 8 was a user experience nightmare (and financial disaster), while Apple’s Newton certainly wasn’t the iPhone we received several years later.

So what went wrong?

A common oversight. In the rush of excitement to release new product features or the next big thing, designers, product managers, and upper management have a tendency to believe that the “build it and they will come” fallacy doesn’t apply to them. And in believing this, a critical opportunity is missed: product validation through user testing.

The Apple Newton was a short-lived product that was ahead of its time, most likely due to a lack of user testing before bringing it to market.

Facts trump opinions. User testing is a set of methodologies, practices, and tools that help UX designers discover problems

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