What if I told you that there’s an easy trick to improve EVERY metric in your business.

Better conversions, higher engagement, stronger retention. All of it.

It takes 1-2 weeks to run. And a few hundred dollars.

No major catch either. Anyone can do it.

It’s a usability test. Get 5-10 people to look at your site or app while they talk out loud. Then go solve all the problems that you spot.

Usability Testing is the Easiest Way to Beat Your Competitors

I’ll let you in on a secret: most people in the business world don’t do the basic stuff. A few do but most don’t.

Usability testing is a perfect example of this. It’s boring. It’s not exciting. No one believes how powerful it can be.

And it sounds TOO simple.

“You mean to tell me that if I talk to 5-10 people, I’ll make more money?”

Yes, it really is that simple.

And if most professionals aren’t doing it, you have a massive opportunity to win. You’ll catch trends in the market before anyone else does.

Years ago, I did some conversion optimization for a used golf ball site, they sold used golf balls at a lower price compared to new golf balls. They got the golf balls at a super low cost and made decent profit on each sale.

I went through the whole ecommerce site, it all made sense. I wasn’t quite sure what to do in order to get some quick wins.

Instead of guessing, I asked their potential customers: “is there anything keeping you from wanting to purchase?”

80% of folks said they were worried about the quality of the used golf balls. I can work with that. I then went through all the copy on the site and HAMMERED how paranoid the company was at ensuring every golf ball met strict quality standards. Thankfully it was all true which made my job a lot easier.

What happened?

The total sales increased by 45% overnight. I’m dead serious.

Asking 5-10 people is all it takes to find wins like that.

How Usability Testing Works

It’s simple. Very simple.

Get 5-10 people to use your site or app while you watch. That’s all you have to do to run a usability test. Nothing more.

You don’t need fancy equipment, you don’t need fancy research firms, you don’t need any of that nonsense.

Yes, hardcore design professionals will draw clear lines between user testing, usability testing, UX testing, customer development, market research, all that stuff.

Don’t worry about that. At the end of the day, it’s mostly the same stuff. You’re looking for real feedback from real people. Don’t overcomplicate it.

Some companies will find people to do the tests for you, then send you a recording. Or you can reach out to people yourself, get them on Zoom, and ask them to complete a task on your site while they share their screen. Then ask each person to talk out loud while they complete the task.

Even if you don’t do anything else, you’ll learn a ton. Where people get stuck, what they gravitate too, what gets them excited, that sort of thing. Here’s a few specific ideas that always give me a ton of wins:

  • Have people go to your homepage and talk through what they see and understand. This is perfect for seeing how people interpret your positioning.
  • Also have them look at your pricing page, talking through any doubts and concerns that they have. If there are key objections people have or if your pricing is holding you back, it’ll come up.
  • Ask people to complete your main conversion funnel (signup, check out, demo request, etc). You’ll find all the little stuff that adds friction to your funnel and costs you money.
  • Go straight to a new feature or anything that you’re launching, have them use it. You’ll find all your blindspots and can roll out changes quickly.
  • For product development, review mockups and wireframes of what you intend to build. This will get you headed in the right direction from the beginning.

All of these will give you mindblowing insights about your company. You’ll know exactly where the biggest problems are that you need to solve.

Why 5-10 People is Enough for a Usability Test

“Can we really get high quality insights with just 5-10 people?”

100%. It’s never failed me.

When I was learning this stuff early on, everyone said that I’d learn everything I needed to know by the 10th person. And most of the key items come up by the 5th person.

I was skeptical. But they were completely right.

You will get the occasional oddball that gives random feedback. But even a small group of 5-10 people will instantly seize on core issues. Those are the issues that you need to spend time on.

Usability Testing Isn’t Just for Apps, it’s Great for Your Website

Many Product teams are comfortable with usability tests for their products. They’ll do rounds at the mockup, beta, and pre-launch stages to refine everything they build.

Guess who doesn’t typically do any usability tests? Marketers.

And that’s where the opportunity is. Since other marketers aren’t doing this stuff, there’s tons of wins laying all over the place.

I even have to remind myself of the importance of doing these. I’ve done tons of usability tests and I still neglect them on new projects. I’m not the only marketer either. For marketers I know, I can count the number of them that have done usability tests on one hand. It’s so so rare.

Which is kind of crazy too. Usability tests on marketing sites often have a direct impact on how much money you make. Refining some new product feature might not directly impact revenue for years. While the pay-off on the marketing side is immediate and massive.

At the very least, do a usability test on these parts of your site:

  • Homepage
  • Pricing page
  • Your core signup flow
  • Upgrade and cancellation flows
  • For ecommerce sites, your top 3-5 product pages
  • For blogs, your top 3-5 blog posts by traffic

How to Get People For Usability Tests

For some of you, this will be WAY easier than you expect. For others, it will be a little hard. First, the easy way.

Ask Your Customers or Audience

If you have a customer base, do something completely outlandish: ask them for help. That’s it. Just send an email to your customers, say you’re looking for 5-10 volunteers to give feedback on a 15 minute call, and that’s it. You will get more responses than you know what to do with.

An engaged audience also works for this. Email lists, active social followings, vibrant discord groups, that sort of thing. The key part is “active.” If your community regularly responds to what you put out there, they’ll gladly help out too. But if your Facebook page is a graveyard of low-effort promotional posts, this won’t work.

Buy Usability Tests

Years and years ago, I remember when usertesting.com was a scrapy upstart. You could buy usability tests by the participant and get a full usability loop for just a couple of hundred bucks. It was awesome. Then they went upmarket, dropped their startup plans, and now it takes a $X0,000 annual contract to even get started.

So now what?

I just poked around and it looks like there’s some good usability testing alternatives out there. usabilityhub.com looks like a solid option, you pay a monthly fee and then pay for a “panel” of users to go through your test. You could easily complete a full round of usability tests for a couple of hundred dollars.

If I don’t have an audience that I can tap into directly, this is my go-to method for running usability tests.

Cold Outreach

This is super tough. But it is possible.

The concept is simple though:

  • Find people in your target market
  • Reach out to them with a cold email or LinkedIn message
  • Ask if they’d be willing to spare 15 minutes to give you some feedback on what you’re building
  • Tell them it’s not a sales call, you’re a brand new business and would be eternally grateful for some feedback

Here’s the kicker: you can pull this off without having to offer Doordash lunches, $50 Amazon gift cards, or anything else. Sure, that stuff helps but it’s not required.

The main downside is that it’s cold outreach. Most of us HATE cold outreach. Myself included. It’s a grind. You have to find 100 people, send out 100 customized emails, and mostly get ignored. It’s not fun.

But it does work.

Personally, I only do this for really important customer interviews in the early days of a new business. If I was building a new SaaS app for instance, I’d do this right away. But that’s not technically usability tests, that’s customer development interviews and getting a deeper understanding of the market.

By the time you get into actual usability tests, you usually have a customer base or audience that you can reach out to. Or a small group of early adopters that you’ve already built relationships with. So most folks drop cold outreach for usability testing.

Hack Together Usability Tests with Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk has been around for ages. It’s owned by Amazon and is a marketplace where you can ask people to do really small tasks for a few pennies.

The downside to this is you’re getting tons of different people. Also expect English to be their second language. So it’s not great if you want detailed feedback on how your pricing plans compare to your primary competitors.

But it is decent for general comprehension and usability tests like:

  • Do people understand your homepage?
  • Can people easily complete the signup funnel?
  • Can they complete some other task on your site?

If you have a specific task that the general population would understand, you can get a usability test done using Mechanical Turk.

Some other things to keep in mind:

  • You’ll have to iterate on your task scope a few times before you get exactly what you want.
  • You’ll also have to play around with the task bids. If you’re having trouble getting enough completions, you might be asking for way too much and offering too little.
  • As a participant, the name of the game on Mechanical Turk is task speed. People rush through as many tasks as they can. Don’t expect tons of quality, only use it for simple tasks.

For me, Mechanical Turk is more effort than it’s worth. I’d rather just pay a few hundred bucks and get high quality usability test recordings from a real company.