Jakob Nielson, who has been doing usability testing since the early 90s, says that according to a survey he performed

” … spending 10% of your development budget on usability should improve your conversion rate by 83%.”

Nielson is generally a pretty skeptical guy when it comes to quantitative results, but these numbers are based on the actual ROI of redesigns of websites based on how much of their budget was put into user experience design and testing. Doubling your conversion rate for a website is a pretty big deal for a business. While an earlier study showed even stronger results, this study, which was done just three years ago, still shows the unquestionable value of investing a good portion of the budget in usability testing. Usability testing is an essential process in design.

Design is, in my mind, the art of mediating communication. The tools we create through design become conduits of messages, the media of information transfer. This transfer should be transparent. The statement “the medium is the message” could also be interpreted to mean the medium should never impede the message. If the medium calls attention to itself, interfering in the dialogue, it derails the progress of communication.

For instance, if a microphone and sound system is working and well tuned, listeners don’t worry about that technology. They listen to the music or the speaker and attend to the message being shared. When you begin to get feedback or crackle or other disturbances from the sound system, the communication suffers. It’s hard to maintain people’s attention if your mic is accosting listeners with squealing feedback.

With a sound system, your audience knows immediately things are wrong. But, if you are not monitoring the system, you might not realize that the audio level is too low and people are straining to hear or there is crackle in the speakers. You have to monitor. You have to listen. Just like in face to face communication, we fail if we don’t listen. In software design, we fail if we can’t hear the message from our clients or from the users of our software. Usability research is the art of listening.

Steve Krug suggests that:

“Even though terms like “user-centered design” and “user experience” are now in the vocabulary of most people working on Web sites, relatively few designers, developers, stakeholders, managers, and check-signers—who all have a hand in the design process—have actually spent any time watching how people use Web sites. As a result, we end up designing for our abstract idea of users, based for the most part on ourselves.”

By bringing in users to test our products in progress, we give our clients, our developers and designers an opportunity to simply watch people interact with our creations. We listen and discover faulty assumptions and designs that could be improved. We also find out where we have succeeded, where the communication happens without hinderance. With each session of observation, we become more adept at understanding our users and ourselves. By holding these listening sessions early in the process, we find we fall short in less dramatic ways in the future.

Usability research should not be seen as an optional, tacked on feature of design and development, but as a core part of the effective dialogue of innovative design. The job of an information architect and usability professional is to be involved in the design of a vast conversation, one in which we are responsible to ensure people understand each other. Our interactions should be designed so people don’t necessarily know we’ve been there. They need to think that they’re involved with some individual on the other side of the transaction without the conscious awareness that there is anything in between.