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Intro
Throughout every project, designers make countless decisions. These include fonts, microcopy, user flows,
and product structure. The list goes on and on. The tricky thing though is figuring out whether these design
choices were optimal or at least good. This brings us to this article’s topic: how do you know if your design
rocks.
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11/30/22, 4:23 PM Design Validation: How Do You Know if Your Design is Good
This list of design validation methods presented in this article is by no means comprehensive. There are
books upon books on design validation. And rightfully so, might we add.
Here’s a good overview of the design validation methods. Feel free to check out the whole UX testing
process here.
Source
The ways to test your design presented in this article are the ones we employ the most often. Therefore, we
deem them the most practical and share-worthy.
N.B. Also, please note that these methods work in conjunction. You can’t just pick one and rely solely on
its results; use as many as possible.
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Usability testing is probably the most common and arguably the most potent design validation method.
There are a few reasons for that. Firstly, this design validation method involves interviewing actual users or
potential users, which is the most reliable source of information. Secondly, usability testing usually involves
creating interview scripts that allow you to compare answers to the same sets of questions. The downside
though is that usability testing is time-consuming and relatively not cheap.
Defining objectives;
See if you can find your competitors’ (or potential) users. Here are a few places to look:
Facebook groups;
LinkedIn groups;
Try usertesting.com;
Reddit.
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Another important caveat is that you'll need 5 users per feature or a group of features. According to
research conducted by Nielsen Norman Group, 5 is the optimal number of users to test your design on. The
reason it's optimal is because 6 is the point of diminishing returns, while 4 and fewer users will not give you
as many insights as you need.
Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/
Hallway testing is pretty much yanking anyone you can lay your eyes on and having them interact with your
design to gather feedback. Ideally, that “anyone” should be a potential user of the product you’re testing so
that Lucy from accounting doesn’t review an app for ER nurses.
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Think of both of these as quick-and-dirty usability testing. Did we mention that both of these methods are
free?
10 Nielsen Heuristics
Analyzing and validating a product design through the lens of design heuristics is quite common. It often
comes naturally from experienced designers. Experienced or not, though, a designer should have these
heuristics top of mind. To help you do that we’ve prepared a checklist and a template for Nielsen Heuristic
Analysis. Ideally, you’d need to print these templates and have an analysis session on your app.
We also have a comprehensive video that covers all aspects of heuristic evaluation. Consider taking a look at
it if you prefer watching over reading.
1. Visibility of System Status (users should know the status of the system and get feedback on interactions
with it);
2. Match between the system and the real world (the system should resemble the experiences that users
already had);
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3. User control and freedom (users should be able to reverse their action if done by mistake);
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6. Recognition rather than recall (users should be able to interact with the system without prior information
or context;
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use (both new and experienced users should be able to efficiently use the
system);
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors (make error messages understandable, and
suggest ways to fix an error);
10. Help and documentation (if a user has a hard time interacting with your app, make sure there’s help
that’s easily accessible).
These heuristics serve as principles on which your design should be based. Done correctly, these are a
recipe for impeccable and validated design.
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Benchmarking
Benchmarking partially helps overcome the retrospective analysis’ downsides we’ve mentioned. Benchmarks
are the industry standards for your product metrics. If the metrics are on par with the industry average, so is
your design.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps are visual representations of how users interact with your product. Take a look at the heatmap
below. The redder the area is, the more users click on it. Conversely, the bluer it is, the fewer clicks it gets.
Additionally, there are plenty of plugins for Figma, Sketch, or other UX tools that, with the help of AI, predict
how users’ attention distributes across the design elements. Luckily, this use case is free and doesn’t take
much time. This distribution should ideally coincide with the information architecture and hierarchy you’re
going for. If it doesn’t, you know what to focus on. Take a look at the gif below to get a better idea of what
we’re talking about.
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Video shot with Loom. Designed in Figma. Heatmapped with Visual Eyes.
A/B Testing
In a nutshell, A/B testing is creating multiple versions of the same piece of functionality and then seeing
whichever one performs best. It’s a potent method but takes time for the data to aggregate and needs
developers to help you implement the A/B testing.
This method is more about finding out which design version is better. That means that you need at least two
versions of the same design. Also note that you need to make as few changes as possible in each version,
ideally one tweak per version.
That said, stakeholders are going to be the ones who give the ultimate approval, not users. As such, to save
yourself the headache of redoing and burning deadlines, you'll need to consult quite a few people. Long story
short, the stakeholder interview algorithm looks as follows:
If you wanna learn more, we have a full article on stakeholder interviews that also features a template you
could use.
Outro
Validating your design is not an easy task. However, we hope that it’s now a tad easier for you. Make sure to
81 combine users’ feedback and user-generated analytics and you should nail your design.
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Free Checklist
Design Validation
Checklist
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