How to do usability testing for your design
By: Amish Gadhia
Tags: Ui Ux Design, Usability, Usability Testing, User Experience

Usability Testing is also known as User Experience(UX) Testing, is a testing method for measuring how easy and user-friendly a software application is. A small set of target end-users, use a software application to expose usability defects. Usability testing mainly focuses on the user’s ease of using application, flexibility of application to handle controls, and ability of application to meet its objectives.

Why do Usability Testing

There are many software applications/websites, which miserably fail, once launched, due to following reasons -

Where do I click next?

Which page needs to be navigated?

Which Icon or Jargon represents what?

Error messages are not consistent or effectively displayed

Session time not sufficient.

Software Engineering, Usability Testing identifies usability errors in the system early in the development cycle and can save a product from failure.

Steps to complete usability testing

There are mainly five steps involved in the complete testing process.

#1 Planning:

During this phase the goals of usability test are determined. We need to decide the functionality of your website to do thetest on it. For example, it can be a login and sign up or buy a book from your website, or post content on your website. You need to assign tasks to your testers, which exercise these critical functionalities.

#2 Recruiting:

During this phase, you recruit the desired number of testers as per your usability test plan. Finding testers who match your demographic (age, sex etc.) and professional ( education, job etc.) profile can take time.

#3 Usability testing:

For this phase, you just require a room with a desk, chair, camera and microphone. A person will remain with the tester in case the tester gets stuck at the point when he/she needs help to come out of the situation. Tester needs to think loudly while testing your website. The session must be recorded so that later we can refer it in case we miss something while the session.

#4 Result analysis:

Data from usability tests are thoroughly analyzed to derive meaningful inferences and give actionable recommendations to improve the overall usability of your product. The whole design team should be involved in this phase to give their feedbacks and point out the problem they found out in testing.

#5 Reporting/Fixing:

Each problem finding are given a priority. According to the priority, we solve the problems and update the design.

Methods of Usability Testing

Laboratory Usability Testing:. This testing is conducted in a separate lab room in presence of the observers. The testers are assigned tasks to execute. The role of the observer is to monitor the behavior of the testers and report the outcome of testing. The observer remains silent during the course of testing. In this testing, both observers and testers are present in a same physical location.

Remote Usability Testing: Under this testing observers and testers are remotely located. Testers access the System Under Test, remotely and perform assigned tasks. Tester’s voice , screen activity , testers facial expressions are recorded by an automated software. Observers analyze this data and report findings of the test.

Usability Testing Advantages

It helps uncover usability issues before the product is marketed.

It helps improve end-user satisfaction

It makes your system highly effective and efficient

It helps gather true feedback from your target audience who actually use your system during a usability test. You do not need to rely on “opinions” from random people.

Conclusion

Many organizations don't give much time on usability testing or schedule it at the end of the project. It will result in the target user doesn't satisfy with your design and struggle to use your design.

What I suggest is always give equal importance to usability testing and do it every step of your design process so that it will give you enough time to work on the results of testing. At the end It will come out as a perfect design for your targeted audience.