Website usability testing is the method that finds what no expert predicted: you give a person who has never seen the site a real task, such as book an appointment or find out what a service costs, and you watch them try, without helping. Where they hesitate, misread or give up is a finding, and five such people find most of what there is to find on a small site. It is cheaper and simpler than the word testing suggests, and it is the step after a usability audit rather than instead of one. This page sets out how usability testing for websites works at small scale: who to recruit, what to ask, how to run a session, and what to do with what you see.
Who to recruit and how many
Five people who resemble your customers and have not seen the site. Not staff, not family who know the business, not designers. For a salon, five people who book salons; for a contractor, five homeowners. The published research on small-sample testing is that five participants surface the large majority of usability problems a site has, and that running five, fixing, and running five more finds far more than running fifteen once. Offer a small thank-you, and run the sessions in person or over a screen-share with the phone camera showing the screen.
What to ask and how to run a session
Three tasks in the visitor's words, each with a clear end: find out what a cut and colour costs; book a visit for next Tuesday; find out whether we cover your street. Start each task from a search result or the home page, hand over the phone, and say nothing. Ask them to think aloud. When they are stuck, wait; when they ask for help, ask what they would do if you were not there. Note every hesitation, wrong tap and comment with the task and the time. Twenty minutes a person, an hour and a half for all five, and a page of findings per session.
What to do with what you see
Group the notes by task and by the place on the site where the trouble happened. Where three of five people stumbled at the same step, that step is the finding; where one did, it is worth noting and probably not worth fixing yet. Decide the fix for the top findings, make it, and run five more people through the same tasks. Record the tasks, the sessions, the findings and the fixes together, because the next round starts from them and because a redesign brief written from real people failing to book is worth more than any list of features.
Questions people ask about website usability testing
Do we need a lab or special software?
No. A phone, a person and a quiet table, or a screen-share with the camera on the phone. Recording helps but is not required.
Is five people really enough?
For finding the problems on a small site, yes, and it is the well-documented sweet spot. For measuring how often something happens across all visitors, no; that is analytics, not testing.
How is usability testing different from a usability audit?
An audit is an expert predicting where visitors will struggle; testing is watching visitors struggle. Do the audit first, fix what it finds, then test.