From an outside perspective, designers remain the ones tasked with making the experience more ‘beautiful’. In cross-disciplinary meetings, however, it’s not uncommon for marketers to push back on your ideas, with clients sometimes favoring their input over yours. Understanding the strategic role of SEO is part of bridging this gap, an importance you’re probably familiar with and feel ready to take a deeper dive into.

Story time: At the start of my career as a professional bachelored’ up UX Designer (2016, sheesh), the power of design was almost palpable in the air; you saw those with great design principles reign supreme at the coveted #1 position on Google. What could surpass them? A bottomless ad campaign budget, most likely. All manner of hacks and tweaks would be sent our way “CamelCase titles convert better?”, “Split up the about-us page in 6 different pages?”. In terms of design hierarchy, they were not particularly logical, so it prompted me to investigate SEO strategies and extrapolate the truly requisite components. Because for sure I wouldn’t want my client to think that a pushback was based on feeling alone.

There’s good news: good design, good copywriting and a healthy social media strategy — remain prevalent over hacks and love bombing your users with content. In the ever-evolving landscape of web design, understanding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become crucial for developing successful websites. This guide aims to empower designers with essential SEO knowledge, seamlessly incorporating it into the design process from the outset. Here’s 4 steps you can integrate in your user experience (UX) design process...

1. SEO used when starting up the project
2. Reviewing the architecture according to the SEO basics
3. Tracking & experimenting + which tools to use

It all starts with the search engine

Your project starts with a preexisting brand and website

Similarly to the end user, you are getting accustomed to the brand. Sure, from the other side of the fence (as a designer) but almost identical, there is an exploratory phase. The process begins with utilising a designated search engine to discover what’s related to the offering, whether for the designer or the client. This serves as the initial phase of the audit and scope definition.

The UX audit can contain:

• Job stories related to search behaviour and expectations (image 1)
• Popular keyword usage
• Most frequent search queries
• Questions addressed to customer care (often found in public FAQ’s)
• The back-linking structure that connects the live website (in addition, you can visualise the flows of the competitor’s navigation structures)
• Social media presence
• Click-through rate (CTR) (clicks vs impression of link)

Any further steps that can occur due to this audit:

• Rewrite keywords to better suit the brand and suggest new communication efforts
• Target localised users through physical media, f.e. flyers, print-outs, banners, posters, mail, etc.
• Start a new social media channel if one is lacking
• Create additional templated landing pages and sections for topics in demand
• Invite the correct guest speakers, influencers, and writers that adhere to the correct standards.

If the CTR is lacking, your audit can give recommendations to improve conversion performance in both SERP and on landing page: improvements on copywriting, metadata and descriptive UI, and scoring higher on Google Web Vitals rules (which involve design and development improvements)

Which ‘advanced’ tool to dive into to get started?

Two great tools are the Google Search Console and Ahrefs. Even through their free plans, it’s possible to discover keyword usage, the presence of deep links*, and organic click-through rates. These metrics can indicate the likelihood of users choosing a competitor’s link over another.

* Deep links are custom URL schemes to direct users to specific pages within an app, enhancing user engagement and retention and improving conversion rates. They are easier to track.

You start with a blank-slate client project

Projects for start-ups, new side hustles, and personal ideas can feel like starting with a blank canvas. Starting a project without a preexisting domain rating DR (domain rating), offers more creative freedom, as there’s no immediate need to dive into data, allowing for an unbiased perspective. However, in this initial research phase, there’s an inherent advantage, even in highly competitive markets like AI, crypto, or fintech. Tools like Ahrefs or the Pinterest Trends dashboard can reveal globally popular search terms and trending topics. The Google Keyword Planner provides the year-over-year (YoY) percentile change of trends, showing shifts such as #ecommerce declining while #instagrambusiness rises. This micro-trend cycle can become a valuable tool, enabling clear mapping of the broader ecosystem.

Though oddly named, ScreamingFrog is a recommended tool for analyzing competitors’ sitemaps. It enables the discovery of all URLs listed in an XML Sitemap. According to trafficthinktank.com, it’s possible to identify URLs where competitors have not optimized their meta titles and descriptions. For shared target keywords, refining metadata can boost CTR and attract more organic traffic to the website.

For designers, this advantage may not mean much, but it’s good padding for your research. What is intersting is that at it’s core, you’re designing products structurally optimised for the Web.

Conducting a UX audit for a blank-slate project can look like

• Create topic clusters with your client (image 5: Hubspot has a really great article on this)
• Research relevant trends
• Research hashtags and influencers/actors that can be a part of your virality 🦠
• Start an ad campaign which vaguely offers to test your hypothesis on different social platforms. You can make public or community posts in groups. Check your engagement numbers on Reddit vs. Facebook, TikTok vs. Snapchat, etc. through their respective analytics or create your own dashboards with Notion or Google Sheets.

Mind you: this is a whole entire service in and of itself; it’s not a 1-hour sit-down sifting through dashboards; you can create a new service package that helps your clients. For Bolden, we’ve set up CXO Design Services for specifically this knowledge gap.

Think back on other successful campaigns in the past and how they launched. Brands and social cohesion behaviours that we regard as normal everyday products have had a long, sustained development process; Uber Eats, Airbnb, Estonia’s digital passport, recycling disposables in Germany, etc.

Your information architecture is your links.

After the research phase, the puzzle pieces are ready to be laid out on the canvas. To maintain a clear view of the structure, placing it in a low-fidelity tool like a sitemap is recommended. This approach allows stakeholders of all types — technical, non-technical, and others — to easily understand the framework.

Sitemap

Maintaining oversight of the internal linking structure is essential, though embedding external domains can also be beneficial. A hierarchical sitemap is ideal, as it reveals the main flows. According to Backlinko, keeping crawl depth to a maximum of 3 clicks is optimal, although there is some debate regarding the well-known The 3-Click Rule for Navigation. From a data perspective, crawling beyond 4 pages rarely proves advantageous. If the FAQ, blog, or community is hosted on a separate platform, it’s best to index those sections as well.

User Flow

A document showcasing all user journey steps and how users might click through your sitemap to find what they need to know. User flows help increase the time spent on a page, reduce bounce rates, and encourage return visits. Additionally, many user flow techniques, such as optimising page speed, are also SEO techniques. There are many direct benefits to focusing on user flow.

Dynamic content examples

• Weather forecasting
• Stock trading

Dynamic content best practices

• Don’t add more dynamic elements than are necessary. It might feel exciting to add those elements, but don’t create more work for yourself if it isn’t really adding value to your site or brand. Stick to your pillars.
• Ensure titles and title tags with keywords are static to avoid cloaking. You can also put an FAQ at the bottom. This is great for dynamic product pages.
• Use canonical tags to avoid keyword cannibalisation. These tags tell the bot that another page is the original to rank. For instance, pages with different colour items will point back to the main item page.
• Compress static elements to reduce page size.

Lo-Fi sketching

Showcase early on where the metadata, links and structure will be on the page. This can be achieved in co-creation with teams, clients, stakeholders and even users. Find a fun angle;

• Crazy 8
• Blindfold walkthrough
• Future headlines

Conducting a “future headlines” brainstorm with the creative team or peers can help address significant questions, such as predicting the viral hashtags a user base might adopt. Though it sounds simple, brands and musicians often establish their presence on distinct platforms. Phrases like ‘to Google’, Q-tips, Hot Girl Summer, ‘Potato Salad Kickstarter’,the wizard installer, and the carbon footprint represent vocabulary that has been crafted and pre-packaged for everyday use.

SEO markup

Integrating SEO into the architecture requires ensuring the website is crawlable by Googlebot. Address the searcher’s query on a primary or secondary page, optimize the site for fast loading, and make content easy to share with a ready-made thumbnail. This includes having the page title, shortened URL, description, thumbnail, and snippet information prepared.

A great tool for preparing SEO assets is Creatopy which can automatically scale banners, thumbnails, and text, which can then be used in your MARCOM efforts.

Organic traffic (users that land on your website without a paid ad) happens thanks to:

1. Wayfinding
2. Link building and easy discovery of more related content
3. Search
4. Finding the right target audience

While finding the tone of voice for the brand, keywords and positioning are already top of mind. Using the correct tone, elements will have unique names that the user base understands, further lowering the barrier to interaction.

Buidling easy-to-navigate pages with meaningful topic clusters will allow content discoverability, which in turn fosters more engagement and impact. Organic traffic builds as users follow these paths over time, solidifying the domain within its niche. Thanks to the TikTok algorithm, finding a niche has become easier; similar content appears depending on the group a user belongs to. It’s wise to be cautious with these algorithms to avoid creating filter bubbles or echo chambers that exclude healthy discussions. The benefit, however, is that this helps bring the proposition to the right audience.

In addition, you can spend time on display ad campaigns to further the brand awareness and reach. This is also useful for tweaking your target audience points of interests. Be open and curious about “what happens to the reach of this Instagram Reel if I focus on the user’s interest in cooking over business content’ — this data will be advantageous again and again.

“Be open and curious — ‘what happens to the reach of this Instagram Reel if I focus on the user’ interest in cooking over business content?’ — this data will be useful again, and again.”

Client Case

For Farmer Gracy, one of our clients, a challenge that arose during the UX research phase was to uncover the truly biggest direct competitors and their landing pages. It gave the team a data-driven, research-based approach to design research. A North Star.

What’s most effective is to build a community that surrounds your product. One that turns shoppers into brand advocates. One where an app can make changes in the real world instead of glueing people to their phones; genuine connection.

Start up the keyword tool of choice, integrate content creation into the design skillset, and embrace the role of a brand influencer on social media. The true foundation of effective design and SEO alignment lies with the user in the real world. Plus, this approach adds a valuable link back to the domain. Just have fun out there. 👾👾👾👾

With this final point, we’ve covered the foundational aspects of SEO strategy that integrate seamlessly with design. These are just the tip of the iceberg — an introduction to how SEO can strengthen your work in accessible, multidisciplinary ways. Hopefully, you feel equipped to approach design with a broader perspective, where every creative choice is backed by strategic, data-driven insights. By uniting data-driven SEO techniques with thoughtful design, you’ll position your work one step ahead, creating more impactful, user-centered experiences.

As Alonzo, our co-founder at Bolden, puts it:
To stand out in today’s ever-expanding landscape of online experiences, SEO and UI design must work in tandem. We always strive to be strategic, pragmatic, and data-driven in our design work by incorporating a crucial element of objectivity to achieve this.

Want to know more? Subscribe to our Medium collective to be ready for Part 2, which dives into more advanced SEO methodology and tracking experiments.

The strategic function of SEO for designers — how to achieve the top ranking on your website. was originally published in Bolden Amsterdam on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A quick guide to justifying design decisions with business metrics.

In a business context, design often serves practical purposes — such as improving user experience, driving sales, or increasing brand recognition. It’s meant to solve business problems and fulfill organizational goals. As such, businesses seek measurable outcomes from design efforts, and we can indeed utilize business-friendly metrics to justify design choices.

Many designers, particularly those in visual fields, often define their work as rooted in creativity and art. While this perspective has undeniable merit (design draws heavily on principles of aesthetics, creative exploration and problem solving — qualities central to the artistic process), it may also lead to challenges in how we engage with our work. Evaluating design primarily for its artistic value can foster rigidity and defensiveness, especially when our work is scrutinized solely on its functionality or business impact.

Art, as a form of self-expression, is evaluated in very different terms than design. The value of art is determined by a mix of factors, including the artist’s reputation, the prominence of their representative agent, the longevity of their market, and the physical attributes of the artwork. The value of art goes beyond its financial worth — it also encompasses the recognition of its historical and cultural importance.

The value of design, in business context, is measured by its contribution to achieving business goals. This contribution doesn’t always need to have a direct monetary value. Ultimately design helps companies reach their objectives by making products easier to use, attracting and retaining customers, and solving industry problems.

Designers play a key role in communicating and highlighting the value of their work in business terms, particularly to marketing, sales, and engineering teams, where the primary focus is often on delivery and growth.

The only common trait between art and design is their intangible and experiential nature, making it challenging to assess their value. Designers play a key role in communicating and highlighting the value of their work in business terms, particularly to marketing, sales, and engineering teams, where the primary focus is often on delivery and growth. Yet in a 2021 survey, Forrester found that only 17% of design teams actively measure the impact of their work.

There’s a well-known quote from Alan Cooper saying“If your boss is asking you to quantify the value of your work, you need to understand that your work indeed has no value.” While I fully understand the inherent frustration, I disagree with the sentiment of being ‘misunderstood.’ Design thinking is a gradual process, and we cannot expect everyone to recognize its value immediately.

Fortunately, much research in the past decade has focused on defining the value of design. Today, several indexes and frameworks measure design’s impact on business. McKinsey Design Index (MDI) evaluates how well companies integrate design into their strategies and operations. Their 2018 report reveals that companies in the top quartile of the MDI outperform their peers by nearly double in revenue and shareholder returns. Similarly, the Design Management Institute’s Design Value Index (DVI) shows that companies in the DVI have outperformed the S&P 500 by 211% over a 10-year period. Forrester’s studies on design and customer experience reveal that experience-driven businesses gain, on average, 1.8x faster growth in revenue, 1.9x higher growth in brand awareness, and 1.7x more new users.

High-level research data can be impressive, but it often falls short in convincing clients of the specific investment required for individual projects. Clients with engineering or marketing backgrounds, where metrics are deeply ingrained in decision-making, typically expect project-specific forecasts to evaluate the viability of their investment. This presents a common challenge for designers; in addition to the discomfort with external scrutiny, many of us are not yet fluent with the available tools to deliver such projections.

While the ROI of design can be measured in monetary terms, not all business goals are focused on profit. Design practices ultimately aim to enhance the customer experience in alignment with whatever goals the business is aiming for.

As Kate Moran points out, designers tend to equate ROI primarily with direct monetary conversions and often overestimate the level of detail and precision needed for these projections. It’s important to remember that they’re called ‘projections’ because they represent estimates, not certainties. In real-world scenarios, various factors beyond design — such as market fluctuations, operational factors and business decisions — can come into play. Therefore, a design’s ROI projection should focus solely on the effectiveness of the design itself, treating external factors as constants to avoid overcomplicating the analysis.

The value proposition should also be clear on where to focus. In his article, Matthew Godfrey divides design value into two categories as internal and external. Internal value highlights how design enhances the company’s operations and cost-effectiveness by improving development efficiency, reducing friction, and supporting better decision-making. External value focuses on how design creates real value for customers, leading to benefits such as increased satisfaction, loyalty, revenue, and a more sustainable product ecosystem. Recognizing this distinction allows us to tailor our projection, ensuring that design evaluation is focused on the specific goals they are intended to achieve.

Bringing together all the factors mentioned above, the design value projection can be outlined in five steps:

1. Understand and align with your client’s business goals, ensuring your design decisions support key objectives.
2. Identify pain points that can be resolved or transformed with design.
3. Outline the methodology and tools you will use, along with a timeline and cost estimate.
4. Compare the projected benefits of the new design with the current situation, estimating the impact within the defined timeframe.
5. Justify your ROI estimation based on your projection.

At Bolden, we work with a client operating a platform that allowed premium customers to reskin the app with their branding. However, the process of creating a custom theme for each client involved a lot of repetitive work, so we came up with a design system that would substentially optimize and simplify the task. The transformation evidently required an upfront investment; therefore, we needed to justify the 10 days of work required to build the design system.

We supported our proposal with an ROI estimation as follows:

• Each client previously required an average of 20 hours of design work to prepare a custom theme.
• Building the new design system would take 80 hours, but it aimed to reduce the customization time from 2.5 days to just 3 hours.
• This would save the company 17 hours of design time per client, meaning the ROI would be realized after the fourth client customization, leading to significant cost savings for all future clients.
• There were also additional benefits, such as increased customer satisfaction with faster turnaround times and the flexibility to quickly deliver customized demos to potential clients.

Evaluating design with clear business metrics makes the justification undeniable. While this example uses a numeric ROI calculation, a goal-based approach can be equally persuasive when presented with the right strategy.

After convincing your client and implementing the design decisions, it’s equally important to measure their impact. Common metrics like page views or app downloads offer a broad overview, but they fall short of capturing the quality of the user experience. To address this, we need metrics that assess the emotional and functional aspects of the experience. Google’s HEART Framework helps define these metrics in five key categories:

• Happiness: Measures user satisfaction, often collected through surveys.
• Engagement: Assesses the level of user interaction, typically measured through frequency, intensity, or depth of engagement over time.
• Adoption: Tracks the number of new users adopting a product or feature.
• Retention: Represents the percentage of users who continue to use the product or service consistently.
• Task Success: Evaluates user performance through metrics such as efficiency (time taken to complete a task), effectiveness (percentage of tasks successfully completed), and error rate.

Another useful tool is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS measures how likely customers are to recommend a product or service, which indirectly reflects how well the design resonates with users, particularly in terms of user experience and visual appeal. Although NPS is widely used across various business functions like marketing, sales and customer service, it is also relevant for measuring a design’s business impact, especially when it comes to user satisfaction.

The definitions above only provide a brief introduction to design metrics, which have a wide array of use cases. They can be used to assess the impact of your design, persuade clients of its effectiveness, or select and validate key design decisions in a bootstrap setting… But most importantly, they offer a fresh perspective on the value of design that can be applied in almost any business scenario.

Calculating the ROI of design was originally published in Bolden Amsterdam on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Achieving great product successes, is nothing less similar, and time and again, testing with users has proven to be a highly effective way to reach that. Something that at Bolden, we’re fully convinced with, and we’ve put together a guide to help demystify it for you too.

The 4 best types of usability testing

We’d like to make known that you do not need a big budget and a tech-filled lab to sustain a healthy outside-in thinking design process. Starting with usability testing depends on your available resources such as your organisation size, their design maturity, the timeline in which you’d need to acquire insights and your overall project roadmap. These 4 factors are the key difference-makers for getting started.

Qualitative and quantitative

Qualitative usability testing is a methodology first made public to a broader audience by Steve Krug in the all-time UX classic ‘Don’t Make me Think’ and its sequel ‘Rocket Surgery made easy’ — which instructs the host to invite 5 people over for an in-person testing session including interviews, viewing how these people experience the interface. But why 5 people? As NN/g describes: with about 3 you capture 90% of your usability barriers and with 2 additional people you’ll account for most edge cases.

At the opposite end sits quantitative testing, where copious amounts of results are welcomed to create a benchmark. More is more. This could be asking your extended family some questions, asking your 1000 social media followers to vote or pay 30.000 users in store-credit. With qualitative testing you’ll rally your community to improve your product.

Both have equal merit but if you are just getting started and have a digital product available; go for quality! These interviews will provide you with both quotes and testimonials.

With about 3 you capture 90% of your usability barriers and with 2 additional people you’ll account for most edge cases.

Remote or Local

Nowadays, digital connection enables us to reach millions of users from within their denim pocket, living room and virtual head-set. In asking for help on a remote scale there’s a variety of measures to undertake. You can start with buying ad space, posting on your socials, inviting users all over unto your landing page or asking a remote company to conduct communications. A service like Usersense.se can help with such recruitment.

If your product is being used in a specific region (think: public transport or governmental) it’s best to directly tap into that community. Especially if you don’t relate to your user base. With local testing you can utilise guerrilla tactics. It seems out of the ordinary in the design process but it’s a fun practise. The classic method written by Nick Babich shows the fun, low-fidelity side of testing.

With our UX team based in the center of Amsterdam, we have the luxury of stepping out and finding people from all over the world in one dense location. We can freely test out digital products, walk around embodying the user and we can interview people on the spot. This makes for a great ecommerce test, as this case study shows.

Interview or Recording

Interviewing your participant within close proximity, either present at the desk or just one step away, also goes by the terms moderated- or facilitated usability testing. The participant is guided via a task sheet. The stage is set by a moderator.

Being present during interviews allows for more context, you yourself get to experience what the user is thinking. The most powerful tool is silence According to studies performed by The University of Groningen; brief silences in group conversations affect social needs. When the facilitator is silent or asks simple questions; participants often feel the need to ‘fill in the blanks’. Another upside, the UX team can conduct these interviews in rapid succession at our office, an inviting space for participants.

Video conferencing tools like Google Meet and Zoom enable researchers to connect to a global audience. Even tasks can be automated in Maze or advanced Figma prototypes, allowing for minimal interruption. Users will deliver a more candid and authentic response. But we’ve noticed that chances are more likely that users will exit the test without ever returning. By providing a sufficient reward at the end of the journey you’ll improve those odds.

The bottom line is that capturing the knowledge of these interviews and recordings is the most time consuming. Going with unmoderated recorded sessions with an AI transcript tool helps with that. You can use Loom or Bubbles to record, use Otter.ai or Granola to transcribe and one afternoon to summarise the findings.

When the facilitator is silent or asks simple questions; participants often feel the need to ‘fill in the blanks’.

Friendshopping vs Recruitment

To get a full unbiased look at your product, you might expect that going with an external recruitment bureau for finding usability testing participants is the only way forward. We’ve gone with UserInterviews in the past. They tap into multiple markets, have access to international users… Whether it’s NDA-locked projects, your new family brand or simply to experiment—they get things done quickly.

The counterpart is to weigh into your greater network by yourself.

We’ll be the first to note that friendshopping (seeking out users from within your network) can be just as effective. Even at the start of a UX Research project, your persona’s are always somewhat enforced by historical empathy; where the designer comes from, that’s where they start their process. Tapping exclusively into representatives that are similar to you is not advisable, as a diverse outlook on your product still helps it the most.

Assess what fits your own needs

Just four distinct types? It appears limiting. To broaden your view you’ll have to be cognisant of the available resources within your organization. Assessing and tweaking the type of testing according to your needs is a natural part of the process. Like, LEGO® blocks, you can always build unto your core and expand. If you have (1) you can then build it out by following (a,b,c,d).

If you have access to:

1. A team of creatives

You can utilise their brain-power to work in workshop/brainstorm/regenerative/retrospective formats, for example:

1. Role playing as the user
2. Brainstorm session amongst the team (Here’s a great result from a Stanford brainstorm)
3. Make landing page improvements to test out your idea

2. Track analytics

You can track quantitative behavior on your domain(s) and see how keywords are interpreted by your visiting users. Furthermore, you can…

1. Track user group movements on social media (platforms)
2. Use heatmaps, surveys, click data
3. Experiment with A/B versions

3. If you have access to a customer care team (internally or client-side)

You can set up interviews and cluster the returning topics together.

1. Regular check-ins with customer care team
2. Regular surveys with customer care team
3. Approach callers through your team
4. Set up a help-line specifically for your design

4. Host events

If you have the possibility to host people in a (physical) space, it can open up your doors in a variety of ways.

1. Host event for stakeholders. This can very well be conducted via Discord, Twitch or Airmeet
2. Get started inviting your network via Eventbrite
3. Host a product launch event
4. Invite larger groups of users for play testing session; a practise from the game industry that design has accustomed to.
5. Your events are an exclusive maker’ club of people that improve the product over time

5. Workflow

If you have a say over your product’ or team roadmap you can sway the opinion towards more user testing… You don’t have to know upfront what questions you want answered, you just want to block in area’s for testing:

1. Survey moment
2. Guerrilla testing
3. Finishing up prototypes
4. Play test
5. Host a hack-a-ton with your team
6. Host a retrospective for your team (or with usability particiants)

6. Access to users

Whether it’s remote or not; access to users is not a luxury but a necessity. You might have a smaller pool due to your B2B service, your crypto/SaaS/fintech start-up hasn’t launched yet or your team is on holiday. But, just as your other business obstacles, they are part of an organisation with a multitude of contingency plans. If you don’t have access to users yet, you should start!

1. Send out an email via newsletter to your subscribers
2. Set up a community Discord server
3. Engage with users on social media
4. Set up a stand or shop on a local event your users visit
5. Acquire email addresses via giving out freebies (ie. whitepaper, tutorial)

A cultural shift is necessary

Like Jakob Nielsen spells out in his article from 2005 (!) if you evangelise usability in your organisation, you’re more likely to change strategies as design maturity progresses. You’ll start with a strong foundation and continue onwards as your perspective on the matter changes and evolves.

Starting point: One or two people in the company care about usability, but working on usability activities is rarely their main job. As a result, they start small, typically by doing a little user testing on the side.

However, many organisations get off on the wrong starting point by using biased subjects (colleagues, stakeholders, investors) as participants. Or sharing only the solutions—without proper context—from their testing sessions with the design team.

“(This) frustrating reality is an open secret within the user experience industry and one we have long accepted as a normal consequence of working in a field that balances creativity and research” Tanya Snook writes for Fast Company. It’s easy to fall into the trap that is now being described as UX Theatre: the occurrence describes the lack of recognition for design- & usability testing as a skill. A perceived process that everyone can adapt to. Therefore the activities to validate design get trivialised. The truth of the matter is that an organisation, from Enterprise to start-up, has to ‘go for Context’ — because the user’s needs change over time. Whether an organisation (dis)likes the input, the final definition of done is kickstarted by user input. It stands as the most trustworthy source of information.

Introducing testing participants is not only like the hiring process; it’s also embedded in the critical design process itself. A similar practice would be ‘pair designing’—a type of partnership where designers collaborate with regular check-ins, and is loved by our Bolden team.

Using the thinking systems & expectations of pair designing with a usability testing participant is almost like having conversational check-ins with them. Instead of a design system, however, you both focus on user experience.

For Linn Harbo Dahle describes, UX-designer at Bekk, the core fundamentals of working in pairs as designers comes down to discussions as a healthy part of digital design.

If you get input and the discussion happens after you have landed on what you think is the best, that will not make a useful discussion!

Conclusion

To sum up the guide we’ve assembled this scope guide. Whether you need something today for a one time session or want to start doing tasks ‘from now on’ — here’s 20 activities you can take up right away.

In the design process, sure the KPI’s and USP’s can be pre-defined by management layers, but the user needs are best defined by the users. When stakeholders who are not directly using the product start deciding what’s best, time to get the expert advocates on board!

Involving the audience is truly taking ownership over the product’ outcome. Your product will not linger in groupthink but make valuable, long-term changes.

And it’s fun! There is no perfect way—it’s testing and trying and error and learning. It’s repetition. At the end of the day humans are fluid beings; strong opinions, loosely held.

Bolden is a digital agency focused on brand strategy, brand identity, digital and e-commerce experiences. We have the tools, workflows and knowledge to uplift your experience.

The ultimate guide to get started with usability testing for UX in 2024 was originally published in Bolden Amsterdam on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.