How Feature Flagging Helps Usability Tests

Usability testing in a real-world environment provides valuable insights into how users interact with products in their daily lives, but it is challenging to truly simulate this context in a lab setting. While non-production usability tests are necessary for identifying bugs and gathering feedback quickly, they can introduce biases that may not reflect actual user behavior. To mitigate these issues, comprehensive usability testing should involve internal, staging, and production environments. Usability testing in production allows for genuine user feedback, quantitative insights into feature performance, contextual understanding of feature efficacy, and qualitative feedback. By using feature flags, companies can control the release of new features to a percentage of users, allowing them to gather real-world user feedback while managing risk.