User Usability Testing Vs A/B Testing: Friends or Foes?

Difference Between A/B Testing and Usability Testing

• Usability testing and A/B testing aren’t poles apart as far as their purpose is concerned.
• The ultimate purpose of User testing and A/B testing is to improve the overall on-site experience for users and improve conversion rates

Purpose Of A/B Testing

• The objective or core purpose of A/B testing is to compare two or more website pages against each other to find out which one performs better.
• The focus of A/B testing should be on discovering which website version is improving your content engagement, reducing bounce rate, increasing conversions, increasing sales, and reducing cart abandonment.

Purpose Of User or Usability Testing

• Usability testing is done to discover how people interact with the website, what problems they face while accomplishing a desired goal (for example, if they find it difficult to ‘add products to cart on mobile), and make improvements on the basis of the findings.

Why Usability Matters

• Usability comes under the umbrella of user experience or UX.
• One of the advantages of Usability testing is that it enables users to learn how to use the website/product without needing guidance and assistance.
• Another benefit of running usability tests is that it enables users to be able to complete tasks with the website and product with maximum accuracy.
• Error tolerance is another big win for usability testing because it helps to minimize the number of errors and ensure that the user can easily avoid the outcomes of those errors.
• Usability testing exposes efficiency issues that when addressed enable users to complete the goal or desired action in minimum possible steps, in the shortest possible time.

Pros Of A/B Testing

• You might have a million ideas that you think will help you improve conversion rates. However, only testing can prove which of those ideas are actually feasible and would give desired results.
• One main benefit of A/B testing is that it helps you make the most of your existing traffic. You’re already spending top dollar in getting traffic to your website, with A/B testing, you’re to find out which design will convert more of that traffic for you.
• Another benefit of A/B testing is that it encourages a culture of experimentation.
• A/B testing allows you to test almost all elements of your website, simple as well as complex.

Disadvantages of A/B testing

• A/B testing is time-consuming. Starting out, you might lot of ideas you want to test, also there might be clashes about which elements to test, and these are separate from actual testing which could take some time because you’re trying to achieve statistical significance.
• Getting any real lift is challenging and takes patience.
• A/B tests are slow to give results. In fact, the time required complete your A/B test will be inversely proportional to the traffic of the page.

Advantages Of Usability Testing

• Usability or user testing is free of statistical errors, is easier than AB testing to execute, and takes no more than a day or two to execute and give results.
• What you test is based on users’ exhibited behaviors. Therefore, experimentation bias gets eliminated.
• What you create is based on the direct feedback from your target audience. Therefore, you make ‘real’ improvements to your product, website, or app.
• If your optimization team members are not on the same page regarding what will perform better, they can resort to user reactions and feedback on different opinions
• The actual friction and bottlenecks that users face get fixed. Therefore, the chances of your product failing after launch are reduced to a minimum when the prototype is tested for usability and changes are made as per users’ exhibited behavior, feedback, and reaction.

Disadvantages Of Usability Testing

• User behavior during a usability test and in their natural environment is often different. When the user is in the natural environment his behavior and the way he interacts with the website is natural. This natural interaction and engagement behavior is what gives better insights into user behavior in a natural, day-to-day environment.
• Usability testing isn’t as deep as market research. With market research, you need a lot of respondents, with usability testing, 5–10 participants is good enough.
• Finding an audience who will take the usability test for genuinely finding flaws and giving feedback is challenging. Most people take a usability test just for the sake of money. They are not interested in helping improve the usability of the product or website. This brings in the issue of the accuracy and reliability of test results.

When to Pick User Testing and When to Choose AB Testing in the Optimization Process

• If you are looking for answers to questions like “Which landing page will give more sign-ups?” or “Which navigation menu will give you higher visits on a certain category?”, etc., then A/B testing is your friend. In such cases, you are testing how making a certain change can impact your returns or conversion rates.
• On the other hand, if you need answers to questions like “Are users successfully able to achieve a certain objective?” “Are users able to navigate smoothly to checkout?” or “Do users face distractions and bottlenecks on their on-site journey to end goal?”, then user testing is what you need.

The Combined Power of User Testing and A/B Testing — Reasons to use them together and the outcomes

• You can start with usability testing and move on to A/B testing if you have a new website or app.
• Insights from qualitative research done in usability testing can help obtain insights that optimizers can use in creating user-behavior-based hypotheses.
• Combining qualitative insights as a foundation for validating quantitative results increases reliability and accuracy.
• Follow this process: conduct usability tests for collecting user behavior-based inputs and then run AB tests for getting insights to find out which design alternative performs best. Moreover, your design options tend to be bulletproof when they are based on actual insights rather than plain guesswork.

P.s: Check the main article for the section on combining usability testing with A/B testing with a focus on the checkout process.

Benefits Of Combining A/B Testing With Usability Testing

• Complete use of quantitative and qualitative data-informed decision making
• Comprehensive view into how users interact with your app/website and how is their experience of using your app or website
• Insights into additional ideas to run tests that can increase engagement and conversions

This is a short version of the original article written on the Invesp blog.