Pilot Studies: A Dress Rehearsal for User Research

A pilot study is a dress rehearsal for your user research. You run 1-2 practice sessions to find flaws in your study design—like confusing tasks or bad timing—not the product. This is vital for remote tests where instructions must be flawless, quantitative studies needing consistency, or high-stakes projects with no room for error. The footgun is skipping a pilot to save time, which often backfires when you have to discard expensive session data because your study plan, not the UI, was the problem.