If you’ve ever asked yourself just why your web site or web app doesn’t perform as well as you’ve thought it would, since you’ve given a lot thought into the design of the page and user interface, then you might ask yourself – are you the proper person to be judging the design?
In comes usability testing. It’s giving the end user a chance to work with your product (in our case, a web page or application) and having a system measure the user interaction – how long it takes them to locate a certain function, where they have the most difficulty identifying a certain feature, finding information, etc. There’s already great software that does exactly this (Morae, for example), but the problem here is that you still need a lab to conduct such experiments.