Recently, I came across a post by Natalie Glance, a learning engineer from Duolingo, speaking about the importance of continuous testing of products and it inspired me to reflect on my encounters with user testing.

1. Why it terrified me

While irrational, user testing used to terrify me — as someone that takes pride in their work, it meant that my designs were going to be put through testing for flaws and pain points, which may result in major upheavals in the design I was so invested in.

Regardless, I learned that attaching yourself to your design is not the way to approach UXD. The good news is, it’s all by design! I’ve learned to embrace this process of user testing (even looking forward to it) as it forces me to shed my assumptions and detach myself from the designs I’m so proud of, to create something even better.

‍2. My experience with user testing
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‍I’m grateful to be in an organisation where user testing is valued and respected. As a citizen facing product with direct impact on the lives of others, rigorous user testing is required to ensure that our users have the most optimal experience. The most recent vertical I worked on was the Preschool search feature on LifeSG — this feature was especially challenging for my team and I to work on as none of us are parents, let alone thinking of starting a family.

For better or for worse, we shed our assumptions and were forced to continuously speak to colleagues, family members and friends who were parents on their experience with searching for preschools. Slowly, we formed a greater understanding of the needs of our primary users — one not based on assumptions, but on real life encounters. I believe this helped me design an experience more in-tune with our users.

Despite my ‘better’ understanding of users and designing based on their experiences, during user testing, we still uncovered several instances of friction within our design that could be rectified to be more intuitive for users. For example, our design primarily focused on parents with one or more children which had done their research for preschools. However, what we did not consider was first-time parents who were new to the different terminologies used for things such as preschool levels (IC for Infant care, PG for Playgroup…), grants, and certifications to name a few.

‍3. Takeaways & growth
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‍Apart from testing interactions, we also incorporate A/B testing into our designs to validate our design assumptions. This gives me a glimpse into how incredibly diverse our society is in terms of priorities and experiences — amounting to very unique perspectives of understanding and how each of us interacts with design and content.

I would also like to add that conducting user interviews gave me a first-hand encounter at the people which my work impacts. To say that it gives me meaning to my work would be an understatement — often I tend to get lost in the purpose of my designs, but it’s user testing and interviews like these that re-orientates and energises me in my work.

I found this quote by C. JoyBell C. “Last night I lost the world, and gained the universe.” this encapsulates the idea of detaching yourself from your own assumptions, to make it better for others.

Stay tuned to my project updates as I will be sharing an in-depth look into this project!