Try It Yourself is a lightweight self-research technique in which a designer or team member attempts to complete a task or experience a service using only the means available to a typical user, with no expert shortcuts. It is the informal cousin of formal usability testing and Be Your Customer — faster, cheaper, and available at any moment — and it is often the fastest way to identify obvious problems before spending budget on participant research.
What It Is
The researcher picks up the product, app, or service and tries to complete a representative task from scratch, narrating their thought process as they go. The session may be recorded, or the researcher may simply take notes on what feels hard, confusing, or unexpectedly smooth. Crucially, the researcher tries to suppress insider knowledge: approaching the interface as a new user would, not as someone who built it.
How to Run It
- Choose a task that a real first-time user would attempt — onboarding, core functionality, account recovery.
- Clear your cache and log out of any existing sessions to start fresh.
- Narrate your thought process aloud or into a voice recorder as you work through the task.
- Note every moment of hesitation, uncertainty, or backtracking.
- Time the task from first interaction to completion.
- Share the recording or notes with at least one colleague to validate observations.
When to Use It
Try It Yourself is most useful as a daily or weekly practice for any team shipping a live product. It is the fastest possible usability check before a release, a quick way to verify that a bug fix has not introduced new problems, and an excellent exercise for onboarding new team members who need to develop rapid product intuition. It supplements — but never replaces — research with actual users.
Tips for Success
- The biggest risk is familiarity bias: you know too much. Actively ask 'What would this mean to someone who has never seen this before?'
- Rotate who does the testing across the team — each person has different blind spots.
- Record even informal sessions: the moment you try to explain a friction point to someone else, you often notice it more clearly.
- Do not stop at the first problem — work all the way through the task to see cumulative effects.
