welterweightUX

The company I work for has 1,500+ish employees. We’re geographically dispersed and run the gamut from call center agents to finance to developers to bus drivers to you get the picture.

We produce websites for varying audiences. But most of what we, as a User Experience team, have been focusing on lately has been the overhaul of several of our biggest consumer-facing sites.

Occasionally, we’re encouraged to tap internal participants for usability testing in lieu of recruiting external ones. We are 100%, definitely not alone in this. Many companies take this approach. The reason why? It makes total sense from a business standpoint.

The perfectly valid reasons for going this route are simple:

• There are a lot of people wading around in the testing pool
• A large array of demographic definitions are represented
• There are varying levels of knowledge of and expertise with the sites being redesigned
• Really, who can beat the, um, fiscal cheapness of testing people who are already working for you anyway? 

It’s always great to get feedback on a site that’s being developed, from whoever will offer up an opinion. But there are definite dangers with shirking external testing to get the opinions of the easiest and cheapest to reach, the internals.

Here are some of the pitfalls associated with testing internally:

• Internal users have an intense familiarity with the industry
• They have insider knowledge of the site being redesigned and/or the product build behind the site
• There’s an inherent bias forged by corporate politics, agendas, and allegiances
• There are standing historical preferences and prejudices
• There are a decidedly finite number of testing resources to draw from. Fresh viewpoints will soon be made stale by overuse.

If you’re testing externally, you get:

• New, casual, or politically-disconnected users
• Those who are can compare and contrast your product to their favored marketplace competitors
• A diversity of actual consumer voices
• Lack of internalize baggage and assumptions

That’s not to say that you should never test internally. You should, especially early on. Internals can help uncover sore thumb or pebble-in-the-shoe issues. You can then quickly fix those issues before braving the blessed avalanche of  external testing.

Later in the process, internals can also be used to validate more detailed, nuanced usability issues. The more eyes and opinions, the deeper the proof sinks into the bowl of pudding.

Buuuut…internal users should never be the sole validation point for an external product. To let that happen would just be a huge flipping of the finger at the brave soldiers who will use your product where it counts: The sloppy battlefield of the real world.