“We had the most problems getting to your house today,” a late-visiting guest might say to you. “Just a mess out there!”

“What happened,” you may ask.

“Oh,” your guest will say, laughing, “You really had to be there.”

Often, experiences, especially difficult experiences, are difficult to articulate in a quick, efficient narrative. While interesting things (“There was a moose on the road and he wouldn’t move!”) can lead to a rousing story to tell later, the everyday, bothersome obstacles that can keep you from your goal can be laborious to recount in any significant amount of detail, and people generally just want to get where they’re going.

This can also be the case in user testing. Often, when finding product testers, we need to accommodate schedules, geographies, and organizational issues that can make it difficult to be in the room with someone as they test a product. The solution seems simple: Send a list of test scenarios and have the users report back on their experience.

This can absolutely work, for the most general of testing scenarios. Users are very good at reporting whether or not something works (especially if it doesn’t work at all), and can let you know specific results you’re asking about. However, testing can be a laborious chore, often given to people who are busy already, and testing can feel like something to be sped through, another item on a long list of things to do in a day.

Testing for user experience issues adds another layer of complication to this scenario. While many people are talented in describing their feelings and experiences in written form, there are many others who don’t feel comfortable writing descriptive content. Added to this is the pressure to say something nice about the software, and employees’ hesitance to making negative comments in written form.

While it’s not always easy to sit in person with your beta testers, the amount of nuance and discussion that can happen when you are together (in the same room, or sharing a screen in a video chat session) can add a layer of nuance that is likely to be lost in a spreadsheet of answers. Seeing someone struggle to find a button for a long period of time will give you more information than a “Yes” checkmark next to, “Were you able to complete the task?”

Remember, while you may get enough information to know why something happened, sometimes you just have to have been there.