Usability testing services that show you where real people get stuck.
We watch real people try to do real things on your website, booking, buying, finding a phone number, and note every hesitation, wrong click and quiet sigh along the way.
For Marketing Leads, Digital Managers & Business Owners
Your team knows the site too well to see it clearly.
Maybe you're about to spend real money on a redesign and want evidence before you commit. Maybe a UX audit has told you what's wrong and you'd like real users to confirm it. Or conversion's low and everyone has a different theory why.
Our usability testing services cover the lot: planning tasks, finding the right participants, running the sessions and writing up what we saw. You get findings drawn from how people actually behave, which tends to settle meeting-room arguments faster than opinion.
Why Teams Come to Us for Usability Testing Services
"Something feels off, but is it a problem for users?”
We watch real people use your site, so you see what actually trips them up rather than what everyone in the office suspects.
“We're redesigning and can't afford to get it wrong.”
Testing before the build catches problems while they're still cheap to fix, instead of carefully rebuilding them into a shiny new site.
“Our UX audit says one thing. Do users agree?”
We put the audit's findings in front of real people. Some get confirmed, some get challenged, and you'll know which is which before you spend a penny on fixes.
“We wouldn't know who to test with, or how.”
We handle it end to end: recruiting the right participants, running the sessions and making sense of what we saw. You mostly just turn up for the walkthrough.
The Gecko Way™
Our approach to successful projects
Before anyone watches a single session, we need to know what your site is supposed to do and who it's supposed to do it for. We'll sit down with your team (a video call is fine) and talk through the journeys that matter most: the enquiry form, the donation page, the path from a Google search to a booked appointment. We'll look at your analytics and any previous UX audit, and we'll ask what everyone already suspects is going wrong. Those hunches are useful. They just aren't evidence yet. By the end, we'll have agreed which tasks to test and what a successful attempt looks like.
Next, we turn that conversation into a test plan. The trick with usability testing is writing tasks that feel like real life without steering people towards the answer. "Find the contact page" tells a participant what to look for. "You've got a question about your order, what would you do?" lets us see what they actually do. We'll decide who should take part, how many sessions will give you a reliable picture, and whether to recruit fresh participants or invite your own customers. Then we run a quick pilot session to catch any task that's confusing for the wrong reasons, so the real sessions measure your site rather than our wording.
This is the part people find oddly gripping. Each participant works through the tasks while thinking out loud, and a moderator from our team sits alongside, asking neutral questions and resisting the urge to help. That last bit is harder than it sounds. We record each session (with consent) and log every hesitation, wrong turn, retreat to the back button and moment someone says "hang on" under their breath. If your team wants to watch live, you're very welcome. Seeing a real customer hunt for a button you've looked at a thousand times changes minds in a way no slide deck ever will.
Once the sessions are done, we look for patterns rather than one-off quirks. One person struggling with a menu might just be having a bad day. Four out of five struggling with it is a problem worth fixing. We pull everything into a written report that shows what happened, where, and how often, with short clips so you can see the moment for yourself. Each issue gets a priority based on how badly it blocks people and how much it matters to your goals. Then we walk you through it on a call, answer the awkward questions, and make sure the findings make sense to people who weren't in the room.
The report, the recordings and the recommendations are yours to keep and use however you like. Hand them to your in-house developer, share them with the board that keeps asking for proof before signing off budget, or take them to whoever builds your next site. There's no catch and no follow-on contract hiding in the small print. Plenty of teams take our findings and fix the quick wins themselves the following week. If you'd like us to help with the bigger changes, we can talk about that, but our usability testing services are designed to stand on their own. You should come away knowing how people really use your site, whatever you decide next.
What's Included in Our Usability Testing Services
Test Planning & Goals
Good testing starts with the right questions, and those come from your goals rather than a generic checklist. We'll work out which journeys carry the most weight for your organisation, whether that's a quote request, a charity donation, a course application or a newsletter sign-up, and write realistic tasks around them.
Each task comes with a clear measure of success, so we're noting more than whether people finished. We'll see how long it took, where they wandered and how confident they felt at the end. If there's a particular page your team keeps arguing about, tell us.
We'll build a task that settles it. Those measures go into a short test plan covering each user journey, which you'll see and agree before any sessions are booked, so task success means the same thing to everyone.
Participant Recruitment
Who you test with shapes what you learn. A group of tech-savvy twenty-somethings will breeze through things that trip up your actual audience, and the reverse is true too. We recruit participants who match the people you're trying to reach, based on criteria we agree together: age, experience, sector, how familiar they are with your organisation.
Where it makes sense, we can test with your own customers, members or supporters instead, which is often the quickest route to honest feedback. Either way, we handle the screening, scheduling and reminders, so nobody on your team ends up chasing no-shows.
If you already have user personas, we'll recruit against them, so the sessions reflect representative users rather than a rough guess.
Moderated Testing Sessions
This is the heart of website usability testing. Participants join one at a time, usually over a video call with screen sharing, and work through the tasks while saying what they're thinking. Our moderator keeps things relaxed, asks follow-up questions at the right moments and never jumps in to rescue anyone, because the rescue is exactly the moment we'd miss.
Sessions typically last around 45 minutes to an hour, which is long enough to cover the journeys that matter without wearing anyone out. Your team can watch live from a separate link or catch up on the recordings later. All participants need is a laptop and a decent connection, because remote usability testing runs on familiar screen-sharing tools they'll probably have used before.
Friction & Drop-off Recording
People rarely announce that they're confused. They pause, scroll up and down, click the logo to start again, or pick the second-best option and carry on regardless. We capture all of it. Every session is recorded, and we log each friction point against the task and the page where it happened: the form field that needed a second attempt, the label that sent someone the wrong way, the step where they'd have given up if we weren't there.
That detail is what turns a vague feeling that "the checkout's a bit clunky" into something specific enough to fix. The session recordings are treated as personal data, stored securely and shared only with your team, in line with UK privacy regulations.
Findings Report & Recommendations
You'll get a written report that someone outside the project could pick up and follow. It sets out what we tested, who took part and what happened, with each finding backed by what we saw in the sessions, plus short clips where a moment explains itself better than a paragraph.
Every issue is ranked by how much it gets in people's way and how closely it's tied to your goals, so you know what to tackle first. Quick wins sit alongside the bigger changes. We keep the jargon out and don't pad anything to make the document look thicker.
If you're comparing usability testing companies, ask to see an example report first. It tells you a lot about what you'll actually get.
Walkthrough Call
A report is easier to act on when you can ask questions of the people who wrote it. Once you've had a chance to read the findings, we'll get together on a call and walk you through them: the patterns we saw, the moments that stood out, and why each recommendation sits where it does on the priority list.
Bring whoever needs to hear it, whether that's your developer, your content team or a sceptical director. We'll answer the tricky questions, talk through what's realistic to fix in-house, and make sure nobody leaves with a to-do list they don't understand.
It's also where what we saw from the user's perspective gets matched with what your team knows about the business, which is usually where the best user experience fixes come from.
What's Included in Our Usability Testing Services
Test Planning & Goals
Good testing starts with the right questions, and those come from your goals rather than a generic checklist. We'll work out which journeys carry the most weight for your organisation, whether that's a quote request, a charity donation, a course application or a newsletter sign-up, and write realistic tasks around them.
Each task comes with a clear measure of success, so we're noting more than whether people finished. We'll see how long it took, where they wandered and how confident they felt at the end. If there's a particular page your team keeps arguing about, tell us.
We'll build a task that settles it. Those measures go into a short test plan covering each user journey, which you'll see and agree before any sessions are booked, so task success means the same thing to everyone.
Participant Recruitment
Who you test with shapes what you learn. A group of tech-savvy twenty-somethings will breeze through things that trip up your actual audience, and the reverse is true too. We recruit participants who match the people you're trying to reach, based on criteria we agree together: age, experience, sector, how familiar they are with your organisation.
Where it makes sense, we can test with your own customers, members or supporters instead, which is often the quickest route to honest feedback. Either way, we handle the screening, scheduling and reminders, so nobody on your team ends up chasing no-shows.
If you already have user personas, we'll recruit against them, so the sessions reflect representative users rather than a rough guess.
Moderated Testing Sessions
This is the heart of website usability testing. Participants join one at a time, usually over a video call with screen sharing, and work through the tasks while saying what they're thinking. Our moderator keeps things relaxed, asks follow-up questions at the right moments and never jumps in to rescue anyone, because the rescue is exactly the moment we'd miss.
Sessions typically last around 45 minutes to an hour, which is long enough to cover the journeys that matter without wearing anyone out. Your team can watch live from a separate link or catch up on the recordings later. All participants need is a laptop and a decent connection, because remote usability testing runs on familiar screen-sharing tools they'll probably have used before.
Friction & Drop-off Recording
People rarely announce that they're confused. They pause, scroll up and down, click the logo to start again, or pick the second-best option and carry on regardless. We capture all of it. Every session is recorded, and we log each friction point against the task and the page where it happened: the form field that needed a second attempt, the label that sent someone the wrong way, the step where they'd have given up if we weren't there.
That detail is what turns a vague feeling that "the checkout's a bit clunky" into something specific enough to fix. The session recordings are treated as personal data, stored securely and shared only with your team, in line with UK privacy regulations.
Findings Report & Recommendations
You'll get a written report that someone outside the project could pick up and follow. It sets out what we tested, who took part and what happened, with each finding backed by what we saw in the sessions, plus short clips where a moment explains itself better than a paragraph.
Every issue is ranked by how much it gets in people's way and how closely it's tied to your goals, so you know what to tackle first. Quick wins sit alongside the bigger changes. We keep the jargon out and don't pad anything to make the document look thicker.
If you're comparing usability testing companies, ask to see an example report first. It tells you a lot about what you'll actually get.
Walkthrough Call
A report is easier to act on when you can ask questions of the people who wrote it. Once you've had a chance to read the findings, we'll get together on a call and walk you through them: the patterns we saw, the moments that stood out, and why each recommendation sits where it does on the priority list.
Bring whoever needs to hear it, whether that's your developer, your content team or a sceptical director. We'll answer the tricky questions, talk through what's realistic to fix in-house, and make sure nobody leaves with a to-do list they don't understand.
It's also where what we saw from the user's perspective gets matched with what your team knows about the business, which is usually where the best user experience fixes come from.
"I always get your team on the observer link because watching one customer give up on the enquiry form settles what gets fixed first."
Bruno Marques, Client Success & Delivery Manager at Gecko
Usability Testing Case Study
[CASE STUDY PLACEHOLDER: paragraph describing a real usability testing project, the client's starting problem, what the sessions revealed and what changed as a result. No real project data confirmed yet.]
Key metric: [METRIC PLACEHOLDER, e.g. task completion rate before and after changes]
Usability testing means watching real people try to complete real tasks on your website, then noting where they get stuck. A participant might be asked to find a price, book an appointment or make a donation, and they talk through what they're thinking as they go. A moderator watches, asks neutral questions and records what happens. Because you're seeing actual behaviour rather than asking people what they think of a design, it tends to uncover problems nobody on the inside would spot. Your team knows where everything is. Your visitors don't. Our usability testing services cover the whole process, from planning the tasks and recruiting participants to running the sessions and reporting back on what we found. You may also see it called user testing, UX testing or user experience testing. It's different from focus groups or written surveys, where people tell you what they think rather than showing you what they do, and from software testing, which checks the code works rather than whether people can use it.
Fewer than most people expect. A widely used rule of thumb in usability research is that around five participants will surface most of the major problems in a single round, because after the fourth or fifth person hits the same wall, you're mostly hearing the same thing again. That works best when everyone shares a similar profile. If your site serves quite different audiences (customers and trade partners, say, or donors and volunteers), each group usually needs its own small set of sessions. We'll recommend a number during planning based on your audiences and goals. For most website usability testing, we'd rather run two smaller rounds with changes in between than one big round that repeats itself. The same goes for people who use assistive technologies, whose experience of a site can differ a lot from everyone else's, so we'll plan for them if digital inclusion matters to your organisation. Planning around distinct groups like this is basic user-centred design, and it stops one audience's needs drowning out another's.
They come at the same question from two directions. A UX audit is an expert review: an experienced designer goes through your site against established usability principles and flags what's likely to cause problems. Usability testing is observation: we watch real people use the site and record where they actually struggle. One is diagnosis by expertise, the other is diagnosis by observation. An audit is quicker and a good first step if you want a broad health check. Testing takes a bit longer but shows how your real audience behaves, which is hard to argue with. The two also work well together, with testing used to confirm or challenge what an audit found. If you're weighing them up, our [UX audit page] sets out what that service includes. Both count as UX research. They just rely on different evidence, and the best UX design decisions tend to draw on both. Between them, you get the clearest picture of the user experience your site is actually delivering.
Most projects run for around two to four weeks from the first conversation to the walkthrough call. Planning and recruitment usually take the first week or so, since finding the right participants is the step that most often sets the pace. The sessions themselves can often be completed in a couple of days, and analysis and reporting take roughly another week. Testing with your own customers can speed things up, as can having a clear idea of the journeys you're most worried about. If you're working to a fixed date, such as a redesign kick-off or a board meeting, tell us early and we'll plan around it. Remote usability testing keeps things moving too, since nobody has to travel anywhere. Larger usability studies covering several audience groups can take a little longer, and we'll tell you up front if yours is likely to.
Yes, and it's often a very good idea. Your own customers, members or supporters already have the goals and expectations your site needs to meet, so their sessions tend to be especially revealing. We'll help you decide who to invite, draft the invitation and handle the scheduling so it doesn't land on your desk. There's one thing to weigh up. Loyal customers sometimes know your site's quirks well enough to work around them without thinking, which can hide problems a newcomer would hit straight away. So we'll often suggest mixing existing customers with recruited participants who've never seen your site, and that way you learn how both groups get on. A good mix of representative users gives you a far more honest picture of the customer experience than either group would on its own. From the user's perspective, being asked to help also tends to go down well, and plenty of customers enjoy being listened to.
Usually earlier than people think. Testing your current site before a redesign shows you what to keep, what to fix and what to rethink, so the new build starts from evidence rather than taste. Testing also works on prototypes and wireframes, which is the cheapest point at which to change your mind about anything. After launch, it's worth running a round once the dust settles to check the new site does what you hoped. And if your numbers dip without an obvious reason, or you've just had a UX audit and want to check its findings, those are both good moments to watch real people use the site. The earlier in the development cycle you test, including on simple website prototypes, the less it costs to act on what you learn, which is really the whole point of user-centred design. Google Analytics can show where people leave a conversion funnel, but it takes watching a real person to see why.
Yes, and we'd encourage it. There's nothing quite like watching a real customer spend two minutes looking for something your team walks past every day. Observers join through a separate link with cameras and microphones off, so participants aren't put off by a room full of spectators. If live viewing doesn't fit around everyone's diaries, the recordings are available afterwards, along with the clips we reference in the report. We find that once a few people from your team have watched even one session, the findings get acted on far more quickly, because nobody needs convincing that the problem is real. Sitting in on user testing is also the quickest cure we know for what's sometimes called operational blindness, where the people closest to a site stop noticing its problems. For the same reason, we'd always recommend UX testing with people outside your organisation, even when your own staff are keen to volunteer.
Yes, and arguably more so. Big product development teams run user testing constantly, but you don't need their budget to get the benefit. A handful of sessions with the right people will show you more about your customer experience than months of guessing. You may read about guerilla tests, where someone grabs strangers in a café and hands them a laptop. They're better than nothing, but a proper user testing service gets you participants who look like your actual audience. And you won't get a 60-page data-driven report nobody reads. Sometimes the fix isn't a whole new digital solution at all. It's a clearer button label, and two small rounds with short feedback cycles are often all it takes to find it.
That's entirely up to you. Usability testing is a standalone service, and the findings are yours to act on however you like. Plenty of teams take the report to their own developers or fix the quick wins in their CMS the following week. If you'd like help with the bigger changes, our design and development team can pick things up, from reworking a confusing form to planning a redesign built around what the testing showed. There's no obligation either way, and you won't get a string of "just checking in" emails afterwards. If you'd like to talk through what testing could tell you about your site, [get in touch with the team] and we'll set up a chat.
Wondering where people give up on your site? Let's talk it through, free.
Tell us which part of your site worries you most, whether it's the form nobody finishes or the page everyone leaves. In a free consultation, we'll talk through which tasks are worth testing, who should take part and what you'd get at the end. If testing isn't the right next step, we'll say so and point you towards what is. You'll come away with a clearer idea of how to get real evidence about your site, whether or not we run the sessions.
