You Watched Five People Try Your Feature and Most of Them Could Not Find It

Your team finally ran a usability session. Five people from outside the team were asked to complete a task using the new feature you built, while you watched quietly on a call.

The results were hard to watch:

• Three of them never found the button.
• One found it and then did not trust what it did.
• Only one finished without help.

You spent six weeks on that feature. Watching it fail in silence is one of the hardest kinds of feedback to receive, because nobody is saying anything critical. They are just struggling, and you cannot help.

Why This Feedback Is So Valuable

That is exactly why it is so valuable. Every other kind of feedback on your work is somebody's opinion. This is behaviour. Nobody was being polite, nobody was guessing what users might do, and nobody had read the design document first.

Resist the Urge to Explain

Resist the first reaction, which is to explain. They should have looked at the menu. They were not our target users. The tooltip covers it.

Some of that may be true, but if three people out of five missed it, the next three hundred will as well. The usability researcher Jakob Nielsen has long argued that a handful of test users finds most of the obvious problems, which is why five people can tell you so much.

Turn Hesitations Into Fixes

Instead, go back through the recordings or your notes and write down the exact moments people hesitated:

• Where did their mouse go first?
• What did they say out loud while they looked?
• Which words on the screen did they read, and which did they skip?

Those moments are your list of fixes, and they are far more precise than anything a reviewer could have written.

Separate Problems From Solutions

Then separate the problems from the solutions. Users are excellent at showing you where something is wrong and much less reliable at telling you how to fix it. If one participant says just make the button red, note that they could not see it, and then decide with your designer how to make it findable.

Finally, thank the team for running the session, and ask to watch the next one before you build anything. The cheapest time to learn this lesson is before six weeks of work.

• Asael Shinder