A considerable amount of time and effort is put into designing our user interface in terms of appearance and functionality as well as courses that we create for clients. To make sure our designs are a success, we’ve adopted the process of prototyping and user testing.

The key objection we often hear to this process is that prototyping and user testing takes a lot of time and well time means money. But at Small World Social, our philosophy is to test our designs in order to better understand how a user will interact with it and whether we have missed the mark. We feel that it is better to spend the time and money upfront than have to revisit a piece of content or design at a later date. We like to know for certain that our designs will appeal to our target rather than guess what they want.

Watch this quick video we put together describing the prototyping and user testing process we use at Small World Social.

As we touched on in the video, user testing is key to a successful design. User testing occurs once we have a prototype that we are comfortable with. This involves having users run through a course or interactive. During this process, we instruct the users to verbalize what they are thinking and doing, giving us insight into their thinking process. These insights are extremely valuable as we often discover areas that are confusing for users or a spelling error. Another key benefit to this process is that our testers often have great suggestions for improving a design.

Once we’ve compiled user insights, we make the necessary tweaks to get the design/product working just right. Once we’ve completed all necessary user testing, the design is finalized and sent to the client. And we start the process all over again!