Perfecting Product
The Challenge
Companies want to build products and features as fast as possible, so that they can deliver value to their customers, generate sales, and capture narrow windows of opportunity.
The Costly Trade-Off
In order to speed up product development, companies often skip usability testing, instead relying on developers to build product features and release them to production. This approach proves costly because UX issues that are found by usability testing are very common and fixing these issues for products that are in production requires many more resources than before they are launched.
The Costs of Skipping Usability Testing:
Skipping usability testing forces companies to rework product features using many of the same stakeholders involved in the initial product development process.
Stakeholders needed to oversee or work on product revisions:
- Product managers
- UX designers
- Developers
- QA engineers
- Customer support
Work that may have to be redone includes:
- Product requirements
- User research
- User flows
- Wireframes
- Visual designs
- Code
- Test cases
- Documentation
Skipping the usability process results in large human capital costs that could have been avoided if the usability testing process had been completed.
Skipping the usability process also results in tremendous opportunity costs beyond human capital. It also slows down product development and prevents companies from having a proactive product strategy.
Redesigning product features costs businesses their ability to innovate. Businesses need to provide some level of support for existing products, so building the wrong features inevitably costs companies time and energy to maintain existing features.
Building the wrong features also hurts employee morale and their company retention. This has material effects on the business.
The Solution
Schedule usability testing to happen before products go into production. Paying for multiple stakeholders to redo the work is extremely costly.
Usability testing allows PMs and developers to see how real users interact with their software and identify any potential problems.
Skipping user testing can have serious consequences for software companies. Without user testing, companies are more likely to release software with serious bugs and usability problems. This can lead to customer dissatisfaction, loss of sales, and damage to the company’s reputation.
User testing is not a luxury – it’s a necessity. Any software company that wants to be successful should make sure to include it in their development process.