Usability tests are great at finding out problems in a design or customer journey. What it can’t do is prove that a customer will definitely use it or how much they will pay for it, outside of the test.

Usability testing will ensure that you don’t have obstacles in the way of a customer completing their transaction. It will help you understand why customers are behaving a certain way, or why they are dropping off at a certain point of your journey.  It’s possible to deduce how customers, similar to the ones we tested, will behave in these scenarios, but because we don’t know how large the target market is, we can’t guarantee that behaviour will happen in your entire customer base.

Usability testing, like all qualitative research, pairs very nicely with quantitative data. Your analytics can tell you what customers are doing and usability tests will tell you why, as well as give suggestions to improve their behaviour. Your analytics will then validate if your iterations are successful.