As a web designer you aim to design and built websites that will be intuitive to use and convert website visitors into customers.

We count on knowledge, experience and assumptions (these are dangerous). But what matters to is the average website visitor who will be using the websites we design.

So hello to user testing. Take some ordinary people, sit them down in front of your website and set them a task. Watch them execute it and become embarrassed by the website you have designed and built.

Things you thought were well designed don’t get noticed. Things you considered were well thought through fail. Functionality you tried and tested develop s hiccups.

You end up feeling like a complete failure. But you are not, because now you’ve seen the website used “in the wild” you can fix these things. And you can remember not to make these mistakes in future.

User testing can be embarrassing, but that shouldn’t stop us from doing it. And we should do it often. Learning new things every time.