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It's never too early or too late to do usability testing, but you learn different things by putting your product in front of users at different points in the development cycle. Testing early gives you the opportunity to respond to what you learn before a significant investment has been made in building the product, while testing later enables you to give users a more realistic sense of what the product will be like. The questions you have about your users should drive your decision about when to do usability testing. When you want to know if certain features are valuable and desirable, test early in the concept stage, or consider using a focus group. If you're primarily concerned with users' ability to find information, test as soon as you have mock-ups. (A card sort might also be helpful.) If you want to study users' reactions to your full brand experience, test after the design is complete. Of course, periodically testing your current products helps you identify and fix usability issues incrementally, between major redesigns. |
