Usability testing is a method where you watch real people try to use your product, so you can see exactly where they hesitate, get lost or give up. Instead of guessing whether a design is clear, you give someone a task (‘find a flight to Rome and book it’) and observe what actually happens.
The trick is that you test the product, not the person. A classic example: you ask five people to sign up for an account, and four of them miss the same button because it blends into the background. That is not four clumsy users. That is one design problem you can now fix before it reaches thousands of real customers. It is the most direct way to check the usability of a design, and it pairs well with a broader UX audit when you want both the lived behaviour and the expert review side by side.
You can run it on almost anything, from a rough prototype drawn on paper to a finished, fully coded site. The format ranges from a quiet moderated session where you sit beside someone and ask questions, to an unmoderated test where a tool records people working on their own time at home. What matters is that you keep quiet, let them struggle a little and resist the urge to jump in and explain. Every time you explain, you hide a flaw you should have been writing down.
At TopDevs we run short usability tests before launch, so the fixes happen on a cheap prototype instead of an expensive live product with real money on the line.
