It’s Time to Face The Users
We meet with testing once again! But hold up, this is unlike the tests we do before implementing code for some functionality. Usability testing is a test involving users that serves to evaluate the application that we’ve created.
In a usability testing session, a facilitator will ask the test participant to perform some tasks. These tasks involves one or more functionality of an application. As the participant completes each task, the facilitator will then observes the participant’s behaviour and listens to their feedbacks.
You may have heard of user testing aside from usability testing. Actually these two tests are different. In user testing is a test to know whether an application suited the user’s needs, while usability testing goal is to know whether the application can be used by users. Essentially usability test helps us to understand whether people can effectively use our application or not.
Why do we need usability testing?
Usability testing is really important as we can know potential problems users may encounter. We should also keep note that we, as the developer may understand all of the inner workings of the application, but may not be the target audience of the application we make. It’s essential to make sure that the target users can use our application.
As we encounter potential problems through the test we can also discover opportunities to improve the design. We can tweak and improve the current design to make the application better and easier to use. We can also know the behaviour and preferences of the target users, which we will have to keep in mind to further improve our application.
Types of usability testing
Qualitative usability testing
This type of usability testing emphasizes on collecting insights and findings of how users use our application. Qualitative usability testing is suitable for discovering problems in the user experience.
Quantitative usability testing
On the other hand, quantitative usability testing focuses on collecting metrics that describe the user experience. Some of the most commonly collected in quantitative usability testing are task success and time spent on task.
What to do?
There are lots of different ways we can conduct usability testing. It can be done in-person or not. It’s more common to usability testing 1-on-1 in real time, where facilitator will ask the participant to do the tasks. But it can also be done not in person, for example participant will do the tasks by themselves and record it, and then the facilitator will watch the recording.
For our project’s usability testing we do it remotely, as the pandemic is still going on, through online meeting application. There are some things that needs to be prepared before we conduct our usability testing.
Pre Usability Testing
Define tasks
First of all we have to prepare the tasks that we will give out to our test participants. We have to define what do we want to test and evaluate. It’s pretty important to make sure that the tasks are concise so that participants know what to do. To keep things neat and tidy, we have a Google sheets containing the task, its test scenario, success indicator, and so on. We should also make sure to prioritize the most important tasks to meet objectives, for example in our application one of the most important task is to bid an artwork. Not only that, we should also make scenario where users can try to use the application naturally.
Choosing test participants
We have to choose the participants of our usability testing correctly. We have to choose test participants that can reflect our intended target users. As our project is an auction application that specializes in artworks, we have to choose people with the right background. For our test participants we look for people that have artistic background, such as graphic designer, painter, art enthusiast, and so on.
The Usability Testing
When conducting the usability testing, we as the facilitator have to take notes of everything going on. It is preferred to record the usability testing session if possible. During the testing session, we ask the participants to do the tasks that we have defined earlier. It is important to make sure that we let the participants do the tasks on their own, only giving instructions or guidance whenever really necessary. This gives opportunity for the participants to grasp the flow of the application. If they can do the provided tasks with little to no guidance that means the application is functional and intuitive for new users.
Not only overseeing the participants doing their tasks, we should also be aware of what they are doing. Do they have trouble navigating to some parts of the application? Do they understand the flow of the application? We can analyze their thoughts and the little things they do, and of course don’t forget to write it down.
After test participants have completed their tasks now comes one of the most important part, feedbacks. We should ask them what they thought so that they can give their honest experience, insights, critics of the application. These feedbacks that we got from the test participants will be very beneficial for making the application better. There may be some things that we even didn’t notice.
Post Usability Testing
Now that the testing session is done, we have to tidy up the things we wrote down. The things that we wrote may only be understood by ourselves, we have to make it into a proper formal report. We should also summarize all the details that we got from all test participants. In our report, we have several parameters such as the overall success rate, issues that we have to look into, final analysis, and so on.
Thank you for reading up till the end, have a good day!
