Usability engineering is a set of processes, techniques, skills, principles, and tools to achieve high levels of software usability. Usability engineering fits into popular flavors of the software engineering process. One essential step in usability engineering is to evaluate the software for usability. For this, many methods can be used. Usability inspection, usability testing, and field research are examples of evaluation methods.
Usability testing is a very common method.
TOP 1.4 Usability testing The ultimate purpose of any usability evaluation method is to identify problems that users will have with the user interface, so that those problems can be addressed. Such a test is important as an evaluation method. A usability test can help identify problems with the architecture and dialog design of the user interface. Another reason for the importance of this method is that software development teams are often more receptive to design changes when those changes are based on the performance of users in lab tests. Usability testing involves setting usability goals, getting actual or representative users to use the software being evaluated in a lab facility, having trained usability specialists observe the test, video-recording the test, and systematically collecting various data.