Usability Testingđź“‹
Imagine this, you are a developer, your application is finished and works just like what you wanted, all you need to do is to distribute the application and let the money flows in, but when the user uses the app, they got confused on how to do everything in your app and eventually not a single person on earth uses your app, that is a disaster. Well, if you don’t want that to happen, I got a solution for you, Usability Testing. If you do usability testing, you can figure out what is the users having problems with when using your app, and then improve your app by getting rid of those problems. Now let us dive deeper into this article to know what exactly is usability testing!
Usability Testing
Usability testing is a test that we perform in our development process to know how easy a feature or interfaces are to be used by our actual users. It is performed by asking the user to do tasks in our app while the facilitator observes the users behaviour and listen to their feedback.
Why Do We Need to Do Usability Testing?
A usability test is important to make sure that the user will have a pleasant and smooth experience using our application. We as the developer will, of course, be able to use the app smoothly because we are the one who created the app, but the same does not apply to our users. By performing usability test, we can find the problems in our app and then be able to improve it to make it more usable and intuitive for the users.
Elements of Usability Testing
Facilitator
The facilitator’s job is to guide the participant through the entire test process. The facilitator will give instructions and asks followup questions to the participant's feedback. It is important for the facilitator to make sure that he/she does not influence the participant’s behaviour to achieve valid data.
Tasks
The tasks are activities that the participant can perform in actual situations. This task depends on what part of our app we want to test and it is important to use understandable words for each task to make sure that the participant understands what they need to do and they actually do the task we want to test.
Participant
The participant for the usability testing should be a realistic user of our product. The participants will often be asked to think out loud about their thoughts regarding the app.
Types of Usability Testing
In terms of the data collected, usability testing is divided into 2 types, which are:
1. Qualitative Usability Testing
Qualitative usability testing is more commonly used rather than quantitative usability testing. this type of test focuses on collecting insights and findings of how people use our application to discover problems regarding the user experience.
2. Quantitative Usability Testing
Quantitative usability testing focuses on collecting metrics that describe the user experience (for example, number of task success and time taken to do a certain task).
In terms of the place where the test conducted, usability testing is again divided into 2 types, which are:
1. In-Person Testing
In-person testing means that the test is conducted face-to-face with the user, this way the facilitator can directly interact with the participant and observe them closely as they perform the tasks.
2. Remote Testing
Remote testing means that the test is not conducted in the same place for the participant and the facilitator.
Remote testing is divided again into 2 types which are:
- Moderated: In moderated remote testing there still exists an interaction between the facilitator and the participant, however, both of them are in a different location. The interaction can be performed through video call and screen sharing platform such as zoom.
- Unmoderated: unlike the previously mentioned tests, unmoderated remote testing does not have a facilitator–participant interaction. To perform this, the facilitator will give the participants written tasks for them to complete on their own time and then the participants will fill out a form to give their thoughts about the app.
How to Perform a Usability Testing
How to perform usability testing depends on your preferences, if you like to do usability testing by meeting the participant physically, you could do that, if you prefer to do it through a video call, you could also do that, although, it is recommended to perform the test face-to-face because we can capture more information by being there with the participant, such as body language. For my project, our group decided to do the testing remotely through zoom since there is still a pandemic going on.
Pre Usability Testing
Before doing the actual test, there are things that need to be prepared, which is to recruit the participants and define the tasks. As mentioned before, we can’t just choose anyone as our participant, it has to be a representation of our actual user, so in this case, because my project is about auction place for arts, we choose people with background in arts. For the tasks, we decide it based on what we want to test, we used a spreadsheet to write our tasks so that it is being kept neatly.
If we decided to conduct a remote test, we also need to make sure that we give the participants all the resources they will need when the test starts, such as the link to the website, the link to the Zoom call, and inform them to download Zoom beforehand.
The Actual Test
Here comes the actual testing, we as the facilitator will ask the participants to do the tasks we decided beforehand and we need to be ready to take notes and observe the participants thoroughly. During this part, we need to make sure that we let the participant perform the task by themselves and only give them guidance if they are really stuck, that way we can observe the behaviour of an actual user when using our app whether they would be confused or not. we also need to create a nice environment so that the participant can be more open to giving their thoughts. After all that we can continue with follow-up questions and ask them to give their feedback, which part is lacking or which part satisfy their expectation, this feedbacks will determine if our application is already good or not and it also shows to us which part of our app that needs improvement.
Post Usability Testing
The last part is to make our final report from all the data and feedback we got. After we got all the data, we can’t just present all the data as it is, it would be too much, we need to summarize and take the insights from those feedbacks and then present them in understandable words. Below is the final report of my groups usability test:
Thank you for reading all of my articles, hope you have a great day!
