The product culture promotes ongoing communication between the product team (designers and developers) and users, validating all hypotheses and experiments with the end users themselves. This is where usability testing, a method frequently employed to obtain user feedback and produce ongoing changes, comes in.
In this blog, we’ll define usability testing and make you learn how to implement it to create and enhance your solutions. Take a look!
What is Usability Testing in UX?
Usability testing aims to verify the ease of use of the interface. This test will assist you in determining how well your product is designed, collecting client feedback, and gauging the effectiveness of specific design components to guarantee usability across various devices. Basically, usability testing is necessary to understand end-user behavior when interacting with an interface.
Thus, there are 4 main objectives of usability testing :
- Identify the issues in the user interface and product design.
- Identify bottlenecks and points for improvement in solutions and in the user journey.
- Check if the user flow has unnecessary steps
- Learn more about the user, their behavior, and their preferences by collecting their feedback.
How to Perform a Good Usability Test?
A good usability test has 5 steps: planning, execution, analysis, documentation, and presentation of results. Below are some important tips for each phase.
Planning
The first step determines test planning, in which ui ux design expert must think and design what the objectives are, what metrics will be used, a guide to the pages and functions that will be tested, as well as the hypothesis of their results.
In moderated tests, planning also involves creating scripts and organizing test steps, defining how many users will participate, and recruiting and selecting them.
Execution
This is the phase of putting the plan into practice. Crucial for usability testing, it is at the execution stage that users’ behavior is closely observed, as well as their learning curves and difficulties with the system.
Here, problems are identified, insights are generated, and so on. Execution is when the team structures the appropriate place to receive users and applies the test naturally, giving people freedom so that they feel at ease and nothing goes unnoticed.
In the execution stage, data collection can be done through notes, video or audio recordings of sessions and even direct interviews can be part of the process.
Analysis and Documentation
During the analysis phase, everything that was collected and recorded during usability testing comes to light.
Through user feedback and also their behavior and other metrics, the team can study what can be improved, eliminated, and adjusted in the system.
It is important for the designer to look for patterns and trends in the interaction of the participants in order to be able to identify what they do not say with their mouths, but with their actions.
And speaking of patterns and trends, it is in the analysis stage that the team must apply studies with predetermined metrics in planning. Some examples are:
Last but not the least comes documenting and presenting the results to the entire team.
It is essential to keep a general record of all the important information of the testing process so that everyone has access and can consult.
Documenting the analysis, issues, user perceptions and feedback, proposed solutions, and ideas for the next version or update facilitates the team’s next steps in the future.
Also, since it is oriented to keep as few people as possible from the team present in the test to make users more comfortable, it is important to present the results to the rest of the team.
This can be done through meetings, slide presentations, or even the report itself. Contact us if you have any questions.
Conclusion
Applying usability testing will bring impactful insights into the design of your pages, solutions, or products, but it is also necessary that you choose the most appropriate method for your business and inform other leaders about it. Thus, they will understand the importance of this instrument and how to use it.