Jun 28, 2026Research
Usability testing on a kitchen table
Five sessions in ordinary rooms beat a lab study on budget and honesty. People behave differently when the chair is their own.
A lab makes participants polite. They sit up straight, narrate carefully, and try to give the researcher a good session — none of which resembles how the product is actually used.
In their own kitchens, people got interrupted, checked their phones mid-task, and abandoned flows out of boredom rather than confusion. Those abandonments were the most useful data we collected all year.
Five sessions were enough to see the pattern twice. The cost was travel and coffee; the finding rewrote our onboarding.
