In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, optimizing user experience is critical to ensuring engagement and efficiency. At Applecart, we prioritize usability testing as a core part of our design process, allowing us to refine workflows, eliminate friction points, and create interfaces that align with user expectations. By leveraging interactive Figma prototypes, conducting targeted user interviews, and analyzing survey data through Maze.co, we bridge the gap between product vision and real-world usability. This post explores how our iterative approach to usability testing drives continuous improvement.

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Prototyping in Figma: Designing with Flexibility

Before a single line of code is written, we create interactive prototypes in Figma, allowing designers, stakeholders, and users to explore proposed workflows and interactions. These prototypes act as low-risk, high-impact design assets, enabling teams to visualize functionality and gather early feedback.

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Figma’s collaborative capabilities allow for real-time comments, design iterations, and version control, making it an essential tool in our usability testing framework. By presenting interactive wireframes and high-fidelity mockups, we ensure that the design direction is intuitive before investing in development resources. This early validation prevents costly rework and ensures alignment between business goals and user needs.

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User Interviews: Extracting Qualitative Insights

While prototypes provide a foundation, real user feedback is invaluable for uncovering usability challenges. To gain deeper insights, we conduct structured user interviews with key personas—including campaign managers, data analysts, and internal stakeholders—who interact with our platform daily.

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Through these interviews, we identify pain points, mental models, and feature gaps that might not be immediately evident in static designs. For example, recent user interviews revealed that navigating between campaign audiences and reports required excessive clicks, leading us to redesign the Summary Center for improved accessibility. By focusing on how users think and work, we refine workflows to maximize efficiency and clarity.

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Scaling Feedback with Maze.co: Quantifying Usability

In addition to qualitative research, we utilize Maze.co’s usability testing suite to collect quantifiable usability metrics at scale. This allows us to validate design decisions using real-world data.

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Maze’s tools, including click tests, heatmaps, and task completion analytics, provide insights into user behavior. For example, in a recent test, we compared two navigation structures for our Audience Builder tool. The test revealed that users preferred a left-aligned sidebar menu over a dropdown-based navigation model, reducing task completion time by 30%. These data-driven decisions ensure that our UX improvements are measurable and effective.

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A/B Testing and Iterative Design

Once we collect data from Maze, we conduct A/B tests to fine-tune details before implementation. This process involves deploying different UI variations to subsets of users, measuring interaction success, and refining designs accordingly.

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One of our most impactful A/B tests involved optimizing call-to-action (CTA) placements within the campaign setup workflow. By adjusting button placement and contrast, we increased task completion rates by 22% and reduced confusion surrounding next steps. This iterative refinement ensures that every UI decision is backed by evidence, not assumptions.

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Reducing Cognitive Load with Progressive Disclosure

One of the key usability principles we prioritize is progressive disclosure—a technique that presents information incrementally, reducing cognitive load. Instead of overwhelming users with all available actions upfront, our designs reveal relevant features contextually and at the right time.

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For instance, the Decision Maker Profile View initially displays high-level summary data, while deeper insights, historical records, and engagement statistics are accessible only when needed. This approach maintains focus, prevents information overload, and aligns with how users naturally process data.

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Incorporating Usability Findings into Development

To ensure that usability insights lead to meaningful change, we’ve integrated our testing process into the development pipeline. After each usability test cycle, we categorize findings into critical fixes, enhancements, and long-term improvements, prioritizing updates that directly impact user efficiency.

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By continuously iterating based on usability testing, we prevent stagnation and allow our platform to evolve alongside user expectations. This process also enhances cross-functional collaboration, ensuring that design, product, and engineering teams are aligned on user needs.

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Conclusion: Usability as a Continuous Journey

Usability testing is not a one-time effort—it’s an ongoing commitment to refinement, iteration, and user advocacy. By leveraging Figma prototypes, user interviews, and Maze.co surveys, we continuously identify pain points, validate design decisions, and enhance usability at every stage of development.

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At Applecart, our goal is to create a seamless, efficient, and intuitive platform that empowers users to work smarter, not harder. Through our structured usability testing framework, we ensure that design decisions are always informed, iterative, and anchored in real user behavior.

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If you’re interested in learning more about our usability testing methodology or participating in future UX research, reach out to our design team. Together, we can build a more user-centric future.

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