So you designed a treat to the eyes kinda website or app: sleek colours, creative layouts, and eye-catching visuals. On paper, it’s right, it works. But then you find out that users are getting stuck. They click the wrong buttons, can’t find the pathways, and can’t complete a transaction.
What is the solution now? Drumrolls, please!
UX testing. Take a sample of the target audience and conduct UX testing with them. The tests will reveal what users want, what frustrates them, and what they desire.
Abu Hurera, a senior UX designer at Yellow Slice, spoke about how minor tweaks uncovered through UX testing made massive shifts in the designs they have created.
“As designers, we often run behind aesthetics, but UX testing reminds us that clarity beats looks. Every test you conduct is a conversation with the user that tells us what they want from a product.”
We at Yellow Slice have been following a four-stage process for nearly two decades, which we call STEP (Soak, Think, Execute, and Proof). The four stages are further divided into a seven-step process that we swear by, as it has delivered fantastic results in the past with brands that can vouch for us.
UX testing makes your designs more empathetic, clearer, and more impactful. This blog dives into the nitty-gritty of UX testing, covering everything from different methods to trends that will rule the UI UX design world in 2025. Let’s get to it.
What Is UX Testing?
User Experience (UX) testing ensures that the digital product is functional, engaging, and easy to navigate. A good user experience has a higher user retention rate and lower churn rate while keeping the existing customers happy.
Although there’s no set definition of a good user experience, as there’s no one-size-fits-all, if you understand your audience’s expectations and pain points, the end product has to appeal to the right target audience.
UX testing evaluates the digital product on the following factors,
- Easy and intuitive navigation allows users to move around the website or app smoothly.
- Relevant and most searched information should be on the interface at first glance, making it easily accessible.
- A high task completion rate indicates that visitors to the website can complete the action they came to complete.
- Fast loading times of screens for smooth performance of the website.
- The platform should be accessible to users with different accessibility needs, such as those with disabilities or who are less technologically savvy.
- Consistent designs make it easy for users to form a pattern in their minds.
Why UX Testing Matters in 2025?
But why not just create a product that works, and why bother with UX testing at all? Here are the reasons that can motivate you to conduct it.
Know Target Audience Like You Know Your Best Friend
UX testing helps you better understand your target audience, what they like and dislike, what hurdles they face, and what else they want from the digital product. Seeing real users interact with your product gives you a peek into their natural behaviour.
The user journey highlights the thinking patterns of target users. This knowledge further helps shape design to meet specific user needs. This builds a strong connection between you and users, which assures them that you care about them.
Before You Launch, Validate Design Functions
UX testing ensures the design functions as the designers and developers initially intended. When you design a feature or an element, you have a plan for it and how you want it to function. UX testing can reveal whether or not it works the same way. It also helps you identify technical glitches, confusing interfaces, or functionality issues you might miss during design.
Find What’s Breaking the User Experience
During usability testing, users provide feedback, including problems encountered while using the product. These can be minor inconveniences or significant hiccups that hinder usability, these are areas of frustration that can be solved before they escalate.
Users’ confusion created due to non-intuitive interfaces can be valuable feedback. If you continue to find complications within the navigation system, the user experience will continue to get improved.
Spot Which Element Needs a Glow-Up
UX testing can identify problems and areas for improvement. There’s no such thing as perfect; there’s always room for improvement. Even if your product functions well, you can always add things to improve the entire experience.
Being this proactive about finding flaws in the design proves your dedication to continuous improvement. Step-by-step optimisation can help you achieve the intended goal in your user experience. There’s scope for improvement in every feature, visual design element, and design process.
Types of UX Testing in 2025
You can use different methods to determine what your customers want. Some have been in the streets for years, but some are relatively new. First, let’s understand the ones that have stood the test of time.
Moderated Usability Testing
In moderated usability testing, a real person is present who serves as the moderator. The moderator facilitates the testing process and works directly with the participants. He watches them going through the testing process and answers questions if they have any.
Moderated usability testing can be conducted remotely or in person. It must be planned, and participants must be informed about the testing date, time and location.
Unmoderated Usability Testing
Unmoderated usability testing doesn’t involve a moderator monitoring or guiding the participants. Instead, participants are left alone to complete the tasks and answer questions at their own pace, on their own time, and at their chosen location.
This testing method requires little time and is more flexible for the participants. It is best to validate a specific concept and conduct the testing with diverse participants, for which you can’t afford different moderators.
A/B Testing
A/B testing, also known as Split testing or bucket testing, is a method to compare two versions of a design element, such as webpages, shape of the buttons, font of the text, and so on.
Two (or more) variants of a digital product are shown to users, and users give feedback on which one they like better. Statistical analysis is used to determine which variation achieves the intended conversion goals.
Surveys & Interviews
A survey asks a group of people a series of questions to gather information for analysis. Surveys can be conducted face-to-face, on paper, over the phone, or online. The most used method is online, as it is cost-effective and convenient.
Interviews are another way to ask questions, usually conducted one-on-one. Since they are conducted one-on-one, they are much more intensive than surveys. Surveys are usually static; interviews can have follow-up questions from the participants.
With the new age of technology, the methods for UX testing that have emerged and evolved are apt to solve new problems. Some of those new methods include,
Eye-tracking with AI
Artificial intelligence can track users’ eye movements to determine where they are looking, for how long, and how their eyes travel there. Fascinating, isn’t it? It uses the eye’s location, movement, and pupil size at a particular time to determine the area of interest of users.
How does this technology work though? The system shines infrared light on the eyes, which reflects on the cornea and pupil. An eye-tracking device captures these reflections. Eye-tracking data can provide valuable insights into identifying changes in user behaviour, usability problems, and other aspects of the overall user experience.
This data shows what interests users on the interface and what doesn’t catch their attention, allowing the interface to be improved.
Emotion-Based Testing
Gather all the technology you want to gather, but emotions always run the course. Emotion recognition and the study of the behaviour of users result in making the user experience more enjoyable.
For instance, it becomes important that when designing for education, understanding the emotional state of students, for medicine, detecting health problems earlier, in advertising, understanding what kind of product the respective market wants and so on.
Their faces say it all. Facial expression recognition helps determine where a person looks and what interests them. Multimodal recognition, such as facial expressions, hand gestures, speech, and text, for multimodal data and metadata analysis presents a more reliable representation of users’ emotional states than just numerical data.
VR/AR Usability Testing
Virtual Reality (VR) describes a three-dimensional, computer-generated environment in which a person can explore and interact. This person can be fully immersed in this virtual world through a VR headset or a head-mounted display, which gives them a 360-degree view of an artificial environment. It looks real.
Unlike VR, Augmented reality (AR) doesn’t provide complete immersion. AR enhances your view of the real world by overlaying what you see with computer-generated information like images, text, and animations. This technology is often used in smartphone applications like Snapchat, which require users to hold their phones in front of them to use filters.
By taking the image from the camera and processing it in real time, the app can display contextual information seemingly within the real-world environment.
Clickstream and Heatmap Automation
A heatmap is a visual representation of user interactions on a website or app that uses colour-coded overlays to show areas of high and low engagement. It helps you figure out the hotspots (that grabs the most attention) of your digital interface.
UX heatmaps are a way to understand how users interact with a webpage. They tell where visitors click on a specific page, how far down they scroll, and how much time they spend on the website. Quite detailed, it is.
Analysing heatmaps can answer questions like how you should present particular information, what the design of a certain CTA (Call To Action) should look like so that users want to click, and why some websites use pop-ups to increase engagement.
Voice Interface Testing
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology and chatbots have taken the world of UX by storm. They are everywhere, from Siri to Alexa. Hence, rigorous testing for voice interfaces is inevitable.
These tests assess several factors, including voice quality, intelligibility, accuracy of voice biometrics, and overall performance. IVR testing ensures smooth functionality of automated phone systems and validates prompt accuracy and response handling.
Voice biometrics testing verifies the accuracy and security of voice-based authentication. It checks for false acceptance and rejection rates. Testing voice quality includes checking for precise and natural voice output for user interactions and validating sound clarity and intelligibility.
UX Testing Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
UI UX design is a dynamic field that keeps on evolving as technology evolves with time. The new trends that you need to watch out for in your next product are mentioned here,
Predict User Behaviour With AI
Gone are the days when apps or websites worked the same for everybody else. Now, in the world of personalisation, an app or website should instantly adjust to the unique demands of each user. Looking just aesthetically pleasing will not do the job now.
You live under a rock if you’re not using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to personalise your websites and apps. AI analyses data and makes behavioural predictions to improve designs for specific individuals. Interfaces are dynamic, and they change over time with different individuals.
For instance, Netflix and Spotify provide personalised recommendations by studying what you actively indulge in.
Testing Micro-interactions Makes a Macro Difference
Micro-interaction testing involves refining and testing small interactions within a product based on user feedback and performance data. This iterative process ensures that interactions are pleasing to the eyes and functional and intuitive.
Dan Saffer wrote a book called “Microinteractions: Designing with Details,” which divides micro-interactions into four parts: trigger, rule, feedback, loops, and modes.
- The trigger is the first part of the micro-interaction. It can be initiated by either the user or the system. User-initiated triggers can include clicking, swiping, tapping, or scrolling.
- Rules define the actions that happen after the trigger. When users click the flashlight app icon (A trigger), they expect to see the flashlight come on (A rule).
- Feedback keeps the user updated about what’s happening during micro interactions. For instance, a red border appears around the input field when users try to complete a transaction and enter the wrong details.
- Loops determine how long the micro interaction lasts and whether it repeats or changes over time. For instance, when you start tracking your project, the duration keeps updating until you pause.
- Mode is the recent setting you change on a device, which remains in place until you change it. For instance, the phone stays silent until you change the mode to ringing.
Accessibility Testing Isn’t Optional
Accessibility testing assesses the ability of apps and websites to serve the needs of users with different abilities and technological competencies. Users with visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive disabilities require platforms compliant with standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
These standards ensure that the platforms benefit users by addressing different disabilities to provide an inclusive user experience. This improves usability and reaches a wider target audience.
When content is better indexed to suit accessibility needs, search engines find reading the website’s content easier, improving the digital product’s SEO ranking.
If Your Users Vary, So Should Your Testing
As a product designer or developer, your job is to create solutions that move beyond the one-size-fits-all approach and create inclusive designs that meet diverse perspectives. For this, user research needs to cover a broader range of user demographics, including different races, ethnicities, genders, ages, abilities, and socioeconomic classes.
To create a product that different people can use, you need to test with those people, too, so that the end product can speak to them.
How Yellow Slice Helped Skoov Ace Their UX Design
Skoov is an online platform that allows its users to view and compare their favourite products from various online shopping platforms in one place. The main idea behind creating this platform is to allow users to compare the deals and prices of a product across different e-commerce websites.
The Problem: Design and build a search engine for online shoppers that helps them find the product they are searching for from various shopping websites.
The Solution: We designed a platform that works as a search engine for online shoppers who want to find the prices of a specific product on different e-commerce websites.
Since it was one product across various platforms, the main focus was on differentiating the price and deals instead of the product’s features (since they would be the same regardless of the platform offered).
Experience Slice of Designing at Yellow Slice?
Having worked with big names like Make My Trip, NPCI, Axis Bank, and Croma (and the list is long), we have learned the best UX design practices. We take pride in advancing the human experience and deriving business results with intuition and facts.
Ready to get a slice of digital experience? Visit our service page, and let’s start designing your success today.
FAQs
1. What’s the difference between UX testing and usability testing?
UX and Usability testing are often used interchangeably, but technically, they serve different purposes in the user experience. UX testing is a broader term that assesses the overall user experience as the user has with the product or service. It includes factors such as emotional responses, expectations, and long-term satisfaction.
Usability testing, on the other hand, is a subset of UX testing. It focuses on how easy it is for users to complete a specific task. It answers questions like, “Can users find the checkout button?” “Do they find it easy to navigate through the website?” ”How much time do they spend completing the action?”
2 What are the best UX testing tools in 2025, and how do I choose the right one?
It depends on your team’s specific goals and which tools will be best for you. If you’re looking for an all-in-one platform that covers most services, such as remote testing, task analysis, heatmaps, and surveys, tools like Maze, Useberry, and PlaybookUX should be your best pick.
When working on high-stakes interfaces like fintech or healthcare and using specialised methods like eye tracking, use tools like RealEye or iMotions.
To get qualitative feedback, tools like Hotjar and Usabilla are the perfect choice as they provide behaviour analytics, session replays and targeted surveys. Figma, UXPin and Marvel offer native testing plugins for designers who prefer to test while prototyping.
