Creating the Right Experience with Usability Testing
When building a new software, computer science students are often taught to come up with personas first. Personas are personification of typical user types of the software and while personas are useful in determining the needs, they are not very useful in gauging a user’s overall experience with the software. This is where usability testing comes into play.
What is Usability Testing?
Usability testing or user testing for short is a popular UX research methodology that refers to the process of evaluating a product or service by testing it with representative users. In a usability testing session a researcher (called a “facilitator” or “mediator” ) asks a participant to do a series of task, usually involving one or more user interfaces. While the user is completing each task, the researcher would observe the participant’s behavior and listens for feedback.
Why Usability Testing?
Usability testing lets the design and development team identify problems early making them less expensive to fix in the future. Also in usability testing we will be able measure our user’s satisfaction and uncover opportunities to improve on our design and improve user experience. We can also analyze the performance of our product to see if it meets our own usability objectives.
How to do Usability Testing
Now that we have learned of what usability testing and its benefits, let us learn go over how to actually perform usability testing. There are three core elements to usability testing: facilitator, tasks, and participant.
Facilitator
The facilitator guides the participant through the test process, giving instructions, answers questions that the participant , and asks for followup questions.
Tasks
Tasks are a series of realistic activities that the participants might do in real life. Tasks can be open-ended or specific depending on the research questions and the type of usability testing. Tasks can be delivered verbally ( the facilitator reading them ) or handed to participants in written sheets. Task wording is very important in usability testing as errors in phrasing can cause participants to misunderstand their instructions or influence the way they complete the tasks.
Participants
A participant should be a realistic user of the product or service being tested meaning that the participant would use the product in real life or might have the same needs as the target user group. Participants are often asked to think out loud when doing usability testing. Narrating their actions as they perform the tasks allows the facilitator to understand the participant’s behaviors, goal, thoughts, and motivations.
Types of Usability Testing
Qualitative and Quantitative
Qualitative testing collects insights, findings, and anecdotes on how people use the product or service. This form of testing is more common as it is best for discovering problems in the user experience.
Quantitative testing on the other hand collects metrics of user experience such as task success rate and time spent on tasks. This type of testing is best for colleting benchmark.
Remote and In-person
Remote testing is more popular because it costs less time and money than in-person testing. There two types of remote usability testing: moderated and unmoderated.
Remote moderated testing work similarly to in-person studies in where the participants interacts directly with the facilitators. The difference is in the physical location of the participants and facilitators and they may communicate through means such as Skype and Google Meets.
Remote unmoderated testing does not have the same facilitator-participant interaction. facilitators/researchers use dedicated online testing tools to set up tasks for participants. The participant then completes those tasks in their own time. The testing tool provides the task instructions and followup questions. After the test is completed, the researcher receives the recording of the session along with other metrics.
Conclusion
Usability testing is a fantastic methodology for designing user experience that covers many bases that other methodologies such as personas don’t. With all that said, while usability testing provides many benefits, it costs much more to setup. Training facilitators and hiring test participants may not be in everyone’s budget. In that case using personas might be more suitable.
