Usability Testing Experience
Our group has finished developing the application features and now it’s time to get feedback from users. But, how are we supposed to do this? Introducing you… usability testing! Usability testing is needed to validate our design and see if our application is easy and comfortable to use by our users.
What is Usability Testing?
Usability testing is a way to measure how easy our system is to use by the end-users. Usability testing wishes to achieve:
- Identifying problems in product design or service.
- Uncovering opportunities to improve.
- Learning about the target user’s behavior and preferences.
- Determine if testers can complete scenarios successfully and independently.
The three core elements of usability testing is a facilitator, observer, and participant.
Facilitator: The facilitator guides participants of Usability Testing by asking interview questions and providing instructions. Facilitators should remain neutral without leading the participant into a biased behavior.
Observer: Observes and take notes during usability testing.
Participant: A person that suits the persona of our product.
How to Conduct Usability Testing?
First of all, we have to make a plan before doing UT.
- Which part of the product that we want to test? There are many aspects of a product that can be tested. For example, there are new features added to the product and you would like to test if the users are comfortable with it or not. Since our product has never gone under usability testing before, we would like to test all features of our product.
- Choose your participants. Participants should be a possible user of the product. In our case, the participants for our website usability testing is the admin who will use the website. For our mobile application, the persona is a 40–50 year-old female/male.
- Create tasks and scenarios for the participants to perform. Each scenario should be informative enough so that the users can perform each task easily. For our usability testing scenario, we defined several tasks for the user to perform, such as asking the user to create an account or purchase an item. Aside from the scenarios, we prepared some interview questions. Here are some scenarios that I wrote:
4. When you’re ready, it’s time to conduct the test. Since we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, we conducted the test remotely via Zoom. Members of our team act as the facilitators of the test, with either one or two of us as the moderator and the rest as the observers. The moderators should guide and give instructions. Observers pay attention to the participants’ gestures and take notes of users’ feedbacks. All facilitators should remain neutral without leading the participant into a biased behavior.
All prepared, then let’s do usability testing!
Conducting Usability Testing
We held usability testing for our website and mobile application. As mentioned above, we prepared interview questions and scenarios. I will share my experience as a facilitator for our web application usability testing. The steps that we do are briefing, interview, application demo while observing and think aloud.
The participant is the admin of PILAR, a 20 year old woman. We have prepared a set of interview questions and tasks for her to perform. Before we get into the testing phase, we brief the participant first on how to conduct it. We also told her that there are no right or wrong answers, she’s free to think aloud and give comments. Then, we proceeded to ask some interview questions. The interview questions should be relevant to the tester’s role in our application. We asked the participant some questions:
- Have you ever used Pillar before?
- Have you ever been an admin for Pilar before or online shops?
- Are you familiar with online applications?
Our participant said that she has used the application before as she is the admin of Pilar. She’s also familiar with online applications. After the interview, we asked her to perform some task. Inez and I acted as the moderator while Ray and Rayhan took notes of their observations. Here are some example scenario that we asked the participant to do:
While the participant does the task, the observers paid attention to the participant’s gestures, such as what they click first, and also listen to the participants’ concerns. After each performed task, we asked the participant if the information provided is sufficient enough and if it is easy to navigate through each component of the scenario.
We also create documentation of our usability testing procedure by recording the zoom meeting and use google docs as our note-taking media. After the usability testing, we asked the participant for their feedback. She said the website needs to be more colorful. Other than that, the preorder status confuses the participant because she can’t input the number of stocks. As she is the real user of our application, we took her opinion into account and improved our website so she would be more comfortable using the website.
I guess that’s all that I can share from my experience. Remember, do usability testing first before releasing your app to the public!
Source:
