Usability Testing
Watching real users attempt real tasks in a product or prototype to find where they struggle, hesitate, or fail.
Usability testing is deceptively simple: give a representative user a realistic task, then watch — mostly in silence — where they get stuck. Five participants typically surface the majority of serious problems, which is why it is one of the highest-leverage research methods available.
It works on anything clickable, from a paper sketch to a live product. Pairing it with a heuristic evaluation — an expert review against known usability principles — catches both the problems users hit and the ones they quietly tolerate.
Learn more
Related terms
User ResearchThe systematic study of users' needs, behaviors, and pain points — through interviews, surveys, and observation — to ground design in evidence.PrototypingBuilding an interactive, clickable model of a product so a flow can be experienced and tested before it is engineered.Heuristic EvaluationAn expert review of an interface against established usability principles (heuristics) to find problems without recruiting users.UX AuditA structured expert review of a product's user experience that identifies usability problems and prioritizes fixes by impact.