Guide to Usability Testing
When you have finalized your product and try to sell it to the market you are not sure if the customers will like the product. You have envisioned that your customers will like it but have not actually checked whether if it was to their satisfaction, thus we do usability testing before we try to sell it to customers.
What is Usability Testing ?
It is a non-functional testing that is to measure of how something can be easily used by someone, and in this case we would be focusing on using usability testing on apps. For usability testing on apps we would need to measure of how the app can be easily used by the users just as what it was intended, the users must be participants who meets the criteria of being a consumer of the product.
Conducting Usability Testing
Before we do usability testing we need to know the goal to achieve a success usability testing, so the test is based on:
- Your research goals(what you want users to achieve)
- Your resources(How much time and money you invest)
- Your participants(The target customers)
After determining the 3 points above the usability testing can begin, there will be steps on conducting usability test.
Planning
The main goal to usability testing is to get the insights that help create a better overall user experience so firstly you need to know what kind of customers the product would be sold to, so knowing the customer’s persona will help on finding the participants that have similar circumstances to the customers. Secondly is to ask questions about the participant’s experience on using similar products, you are trying to sell a product that solves their problem better than other existing products so there are similar fundamental usage and so we collect demographic and psychographic information for analyzation.Lastly is to determine what kind of tasks will be tested on the participants, by comparing their usage of the product and the ideal way of using it we can see what can be improved to meet the customer’s satisfaction.
Finding Participants
After making the scenario for testing we need to find the participants that we need to test on the product. The participants must have the same persona as the ideal customers, an example would be the participant’s age and the customer persona’s age must be the same. We can find participants by doing a survey and asking for someone’s time or have a mediator to introduce participants.
Running the Session
When running the session there would be a participant, moderator and a supervisor. The supervisor will observe the session without talking to the participant and records what had happened on the session and the moderator will test the participant on their product but before testing the moderator need to make sure the participant is physically comfortable with the setup or it can affect the results. The moderator will then collect some predetermined questions from the planning step and the test will begin by giving tasks to the participants, then the result will be recorded.
Analyzing the Data
After you’ve collected all your data, it’s time to analyze the results and make conclusions. As you go over the data prioritize the most frequent or most serious problem that was encountered for further examination as that affects their user experience.
How We Implemented Our Usability Testing
Since we are in the middle of the pandemic, we cannot interact with strangers on the streets or meet with acquaintances outside. In our case our customer persona is similar to a housewive, where their age is around 40–50 years old and they have experience on online shopping and thus we can conduct usability testing on our families. We also conduct usability testing from participants that our product owner introduced for another persona.
Conclusion
Usability testing is a non-functional testing that is to measure of how something can be easily used by someone, we conduct usability testing because we want our customers to have a good experience when using our product thus an experimentation is needed on what the customer likes and does not like in the product.
