USABILITY TESTING: HOW TO DO IT

Usability testing is a great product evaluation technique. Usability testing is generally done to understand any underlying usability issues, and pain points across multiple touch points. This can be done during the prototype stage as well. It becomes less costly for businesses to make changes in the product before launch and save costs by not investing in any expensive tools or resources before the launching process.

Creating Objectives and understanding your users: To deliver a user-friendly interface it is important to understand the target group. The businesses select participants depending on the objective to begin with.

Framing Tasks to discover user experience: To understand the positives and negatives in terms of the user’s experiences, certain tasks are assigned to participants like navigating to certain sections of the website or booking a connected flight. The objective is to understand participants’ experiences, pain points, and underlying usability issues while performing the tasks.

Usability Testing takes place with individual participants: The participants are handed over the device to operate like a website, mobile app, or wearable device. The researcher explains the objective of the testing and guides the participant during the testing. The researcher tries to understand the reasoning behind the steps taken by the participant and observes the behavior of the participants during the testing.

Evaluating user experience: The researchers observe the performance of participants for the assigned tasks and evaluate whether they were successful at completing the tasks with or without any complications. The researchers gather their opinions and ideas to improve the process.

Analyse and Report: The average duration to complete the task, frustration points, problematic features, and confusing or complicated features make up for the final output. User opinions and recommendations are also included in the reports. This helps the designers to make changes in their products and bring improvements for their users.