UX LAB HIRE IN MANCHESTER

Usability testing is watching real people attempt real tasks on your website or app, to find out where they struggle.

It is different from analytics, which tells you that people drop off a page but not why, and different from asking people what they think, because what users say they do and what they actually do are rarely the same.

In a moderated test, a researcher sets tasks, observes without helping, and asks follow-up questions afterwards.

Five is enough for a single user journey, eight for a complex site or app.

Research going back to the early 1990s found that five participants surface the large majority of usability problems in a given flow, with each additional participant adding progressively less.

Our lite study uses five participants over one lab day, and our full study uses eight over two days. Spending more usually means testing more journeys rather than adding people to the same one.

Lab hire is £750 a day, or from £450 for a half day, if you are running your own research with your own participants.

A lite study is £5,500 and covers five participants over one lab day, including study design, recruitment, incentives, moderation, recordings and eye tracking heatmaps.

A full study is £9,500 and covers eight participants over two days, adding interpreted eye tracking analysis, an in-depth report and a stakeholder playback session.

Weekend bookings carry a 50% surcharge and evening sessions 30%.

Yes, on the lite and full studies. We source and screen participants against your target audience, and handle incentives and scheduling.

Lab hire is the exception: you bring your own participants, and we provide the space, the technician and the equipment.

You can, but you typically shouldn't.

Your team already know your product names, your internal jargon and how the navigation is meant to work, and they cannot un-know it during a test. They will complete tasks easily and you will conclude the site works, when what you have actually measured is how well your own staff know your own site. They also want the project to succeed, which makes them reluctant to say the thing you need to hear.

The exceptions: staff are ideal for a pilot run, checking your tasks make sense, and the technology works before real participants arrive. And if you are testing an internal tool or intranet, staff are the correct audience, though it should be the team who use it rather than the team who built it.

Screen for behaviour, not demographics. The question that matters is whether someone genuinely does the thing your site is for, not whether they match an age bracket in a persona document. A good screener asks what people have actually bought, used or searched for recently, rather than what they think about your category, because stated attitudes and real behaviour diverge constantly.

Three things are worth screening out:

1. People who have taken part in several studies recently, because they start performing for the researcher rather than behaving normally.

2. People who work in UX, design or marketing, because they critique interfaces instead of using them.

3. Anyone connected to your business. 

We also over-recruit slightly, since no-shows happen and losing one participant on a five-person study costs you twenty per cent of your data.

Yes, from a separate observation room or via live stream. Watching live is the part clients consistently say changed their mind about something, because reading that users struggled with a form is very different from watching someone give up on it.

Participants are aware they are being observed and are not in the room with you.

The lab is at The Sharp Project in Manchester, about ten minutes from the city centre, with free on-site parking and a Metrolink stop nearby. Refreshments are provided throughout the day, and there is a canteen downstairs.

The room is deliberately informal, with sofas and comfortable chairs, because a clinical environment changes how people behave and that changes your data.

Between 45 and 60 minutes per participant.

That covers a pre-task interview, the tasks themselves with think-aloud prompts, and a post-task interview.

It is long enough to get past the first-impression effect and short enough that participants do not tire, which matters because fatigue produces unreliable behaviour.

A report with prioritised findings, plus the video evidence and eye-tracking heatmaps behind them, and recommendations your team can act on immediately.

Findings are ranked by severity and impact rather than listed, so you know what to fix first.

Full studies also include a playback session with your stakeholders.

Turnaround on reports will depend on the complexity of the study.

Yes, and it is usually the better time to test. We test clickable Figma prototypes, which means you can find fundamental problems before a developer is booked.

Fixing a flawed journey in a prototype costs a fraction of fixing it after build, and testing at prototype stage is the single highest-return point in a project.

Yes. We run accessibility testing with participants who use screen readers, screen enlargers, voice recognition software and other assistive technology.

This is different from an automated accessibility audit, which checks your code against WCAG but cannot tell you whether a screen reader user can actually complete a purchase.

Both are useful and they answer different questions.

More than most teams expect, and the surprise is rarely the incentives.

A DIY study has four costs: participant incentives, recruitment and screening, tools or equipment, and your own team's time.

The one that catches people out is analysis, which typically takes two to three times as long as the sessions themselves.

Five hours of recorded sessions becomes most of a working week once you have watched, coded and written it up.

Eye tracking is the other constraint, because the hardware and software cost considerably more than a single study.

If you have your own researchers and participants and just need the room and the equipment, lab hire at £750 a day is usually the sensible middle ground.