Usability Testing
Why hello, welcome to another hipster-related article! Today, I’ll be writing about usability testing, or UT for short!
What is Usability Testing (UT)?
Before we get into usability testing, let’s define what usability is. According to ISO, usability is “the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use”.
The definition can be broken down into this illustration below:
With this, usability testing is a qualitative research method to validate and test a software design in regards to completion, errors, task time, and user pleasure. This is done by observing an individual’s experience with a concrete prototype as they walk through the steps of a given task.
Basic Scenario for PsychoTip UT
Now we’ll discuss about the UT that I did for PsychoTip. First, the scenario.
For the scenario, I tested the features that are included as the MVP of PsychoTip. The features differ a little bit between the client and the psychologists, which are taken into account during the creation of the scenario.
#1 Client Scenario
- Account Registration
- Account Login/Logout
- Account Profile
- Dashboard
- Online Counseling (Create Online Counseling, Chat)
- Counseling Schedule
#2 Psychologist Scenario
- Account Registration
- Account Login/Logout
- Account Profile
- Dashboard
- Online Counseling (Chat)
- Counseling Schedule (Create Routine Schedule, Create Individual Schedule, See Booked / Available Schedule)
- Finance Page
These scenarios will be mostly conducted on the application. For the features that are not fully implemented on the application, the prototype will be used. The scenario sheet can be seen here.
Usability Test Result
Because of time and availability constraint, I only managed to conduct usability tests to two different people. But even so, these two people cover both of our targeted users for PsychoTip. Here are their profile and also the results from their usability tests below:
#1 First Respondent
- Age: 20
- Gender: Female
- Occupation: Undergraduate Student
The first respondent has never used a similar app like PsychoTip.
During UT, the first respondent didn’t find any significant hurdles when they were doing the specified tasks. The respondent managed to find and use the features that are available on the application/prototype. What the respondent likes most about PsychoTip is it’s minimalist design and how the colors evoke a sense of calmness.
But even so, the respondent mentioned a few things that can further improve PsychoTip, which are:
- Adding icons and description to “Client” and “Psychologist” during registration.
- Redesign Quote of the Day in the dashboard, as it looks clickable but apparently it’s not.
- Make chat feature more obvious, as it is the main feature.
#2 Second Respondent
- Age: 30
- Gender: Female
- Occupation: Lecturer at Atma Jaya University
The second respondent has used a similar app like PsychoTip.
During UT, the second respondent succeeded to find and use the feaures that are available on the application/prototype. Unfortunately, they expressed that the finance page is hard to find, and suggested to move it to a more obvious place.
Besides that, there were also a few suggestions from the respondent:
- Make marks on schedule more obvious, as it’s confusing now what the mark means.
- Consider using modal for registration success, instead of a whole page.
- Merge routine and individual schedule creation, as it’s a little bit confusing now that routine is changed in dashboard, and individual schedule is created in calendar.
System Usability Scale Result
After the usability tests, I also gave them a System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire to fill.
The SUS is a reliable tool for measuring usability. It consists of a 10 item questionnaire with five response options for respondents; from Strongly agree to Strongly disagree. The SUS will result in a scale that ranges from 0–100, which can be interpreted as below:
After calculation, here are the SUS result that we obtained from the two respondents:
- Respondent 1: 80
- Respondent 2: 72.5
In average, the SUS score obtained is 76.25.
Based on the scale above, the current design of PsychoTip is categorized as ‘Good’. For a first iteration, I feel we did a pretty great job in designing the application.
The next step would be to consider and apply the suggestions given by the respondents, but that will be done in a future occasion.
And that’s it for this article! Thanks for reading!
