5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Usability Testing
But first, what is usability testing?
Usability testing is the process of validating your design to an intended target audience. Before fully releasing our product, we would test it to gain quick feedback about how users used our product, and evaluate its initial usage.
One of the best ways to make a good business is by really knowing your customers. Usability testing is one of the most important user research tools to understand how a customer interacts with your product.
Here are 5 reasons why usability testing matters.
1. Save time and money
It’s important to run through and analyze your designs. It may seem like a hassle to add extra time to your product development timeline, especially when you want to ship fast.
However, a time allocated for usability tests can actually be an investment.
Through usability testing, we can find how customers use our product, or whether their need is answered through our product already. Finding out what makes our product fail faster and earlier will help you from spending unnecessary costs in the later stage.
If the product is not adopted well by the users, we can fix and iterate through design. This is a better process than finding out that you’re actually building the wrong product, or finding our users have trouble using your product after it’s fully released.
2. Increase conversion rate, hence increases revenue.
We can prevent users from doing up an error, hence make them hate our website.
By understanding the above, you can create a fitting product. How they behave will also inform you to help them achieve their goals. When people have a good impression of your site, they are more likely to develop positive reviews, rather it is online or word-of-mouth.
3. To validate our business assumptions
When making business goals, these business decisions are still happening within the team’s environment and internal decisions.
Usability testing can bridge your product before the full release and help us see whether our product is the right way for us to reach our metrics.
The product manager or product designer’s mental model might be different from the users. One user might use a design differently from other types of users since they will have different thought processes.
Hence, it is also important for us to test it with our actual target users.
By validating the product, we can see the answer to some questions, such as how it is actually used in real life? Does it meet the user’s expectations? How do the users interact with the product? And many more.
We may find things that are beyond our expectations.
4. See what works and what doesn’t to successfully improve product
By testing our ideas, we can see what works and what doesn’t, and improve from there.
How does a user who successfully use the product look? Who are the users who succeed? What kind of errors are used? See the room for improvement.
5. Gain an advantage over your competition
When you deliver an outstanding user experience you set yourself apart from your competitors, giving your business an advantage in the industry. Usability testing makes teams more intelligent by improving design decision-making. Users are looking for exceptional interactions that meet their needs. They don’t have the patience to stick around to discover what you have to offer. People are aware that they have other options, and aren’t hesitant to entertain them.
Nielsen Norman Group even stated that it takes only 5 people to help us surface critical problems. If any chance, design helps us find out our problems and for us to achieve usability goals.
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Natuno is a Product Design firm that helps your business reach its goals through product design and strategy. Wanna know how we can help? Learn more.
