I’ve been thinking a lot about my progress as a UX designer recently, and if I had to point to one thing that’s had the biggest impact on how I work, it’s user testing.
I’ve run hundreds of user tests over the years. Not just as a validation step, but as a constant feedback loop. That process has fundamentally changed how I approach design – and more importantly, how I think.
Let me explain.
There are plenty of times where you’re convinced a problem can be solved by X. You can see it clearly in your head. It makes sense. So off you go, designing X… and then you test it.
Flat. Dead. Not even close.
The opposite happens too. You go into a session thinking “there’s no way this will work”, only to watch users breeze through it with zero issues. That moment never stops being humbling.
The lesson?
Don’t get married to solutions.
Stay open. Be prepared to be wrong. That’s harder than it sounds – humans are wired to defend their ideas.
User testing also teaches you smaller, subtler things that compound over time.
For example: how people actually consume content.
Unless it’s a long-form article (and even then…), most users don’t read – they scan. They skim. Their eyes hunt for things that look important. If something stands out in the right way, they might stop and read. If it doesn’t, it may as well not exist.
That creates a balancing act. Make something too subtle and it’s missed. Make it too loud and you risk banner blindness – that subconscious filtering people do when something smells like an ad or upsell.
Another big one: important information often needs repeating.
If something genuinely affects a user’s decision – spending money, committing to something, avoiding risk – putting it in one perfect place isn’t always enough. Users don’t experience journeys linearly. Sometimes you need to surface the same helpful information in multiple locations so it’s picked up naturally.
Do that with things that help users? Fine.
Do it with upsells? Expect eye-rolls.
All of this – and plenty more – comes from years of testing, watching, listening, and occasionally wincing. These insights become tools you carry into every new problem, even before a single wireframe exists.
There’s also the difference between knowing something is wrong and knowing why it’s wrong.
Quantitative data is great. Drops in conversion, rising contact rates, declining satisfaction scores – they tell you where the pain is. But they rarely tell you what users are thinking, feeling, or struggling with in real time.
That’s where qualitative research matters.
Without it, problems can disguise themselves as something else. You end up confidently solving the wrong thing – and wondering why nothing improves.
Ever watched a crime documentary where the detective locks onto a suspect and refuses to let go?
“It’s definitely him. I know it.”
And then… it’s not.
You don’t want to be that person in UX.
Finally – and this one’s important – don’t always accept the problem as it’s been handed to you. Unless it’s been thoroughly researched by actual UX researchers, treat it as a hypothesis, not a fact.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been given a problem and a proposed solution, only to discover the real issue lived somewhere else entirely. The original conclusion was inferred, not verified – and the team had been chasing their tail for months.
User testing won’t make you Columbo.
But if you use it properly, it’ll get you pretty close to a UX version of him.
