Us·a·bil·i·ty Test·ing
/ˌyo͞ozəˈbilədē ˈtes.tɪŋ/
Seeing this not too long after reading my Persona blog, you must be thinking, “Does this college student not sleep or something? Or does this kid have too much time on his hands?”. To be honest, I don’t even know why I’m making a blog about Usability Testing, but let’s just get on to it!
Usability Testing
/ˌyo͞ozəˈbilədē/ : the degree to which something is able or fit to be used
/ˈtes.tɪŋ/ : the act or practice of giving tests to measure someone’s knowledge or ability
If we combine those two meaning together, Usability Testing would mean:
the act or practice of giving tests to measure if something is usable or fit to be used by someone.
Similar to that, the general meaning of UT (Usability Testing), is a technique usually used in user-centric interaction design to evaluate a product or prototype by doing tests on users. This is a very important task and considered irreplaceable, as it gives direct feedback and input on how actual users use our product.
It’s mostly done on new users who have not yet been exposed to our product, so we can clear up all the confusion that may arise during the usage of our product. It’s also a good way to get input/feedback if our product is not well-received by the market, as we can get direct feedback on which design/flow that are complicated/inefficient.
You can also see if your product really is fit to be used by observing if there are any usability issues, problems, or bugs during the testing. There might be some problems that might arise because we weren’t careful when we tested it ourselves, but once it got to the hands of users, it suddenly appears. Therefore, we can fix it before we continue any longer, and go on testing it again.
Benefits
1. Validation
Invite users to see the early staging development process before you finally decide on the final product. Can this bring users joy? Can this help them develop as a person? Put simply, can this help users in any sort of way? It’s important to do this early on before you waste too much time and resources into your project only to find out it’s not a product that the market would use. If you do this too late, it would be bad civilization.
2. Confirm Your Product
What this means is that you can confirm that there aren’t any problems that may arise. We can make sure everything works as they’re supposed to and not get spooked by unnecessary errors/bugs.
3. Identify Issues
Whether you’re creating a product for babies to use, or senior citizens, there is bound to be confusion on some function or flow. Even though we’ve thought about the simplest method ever, there will be someone who doesn’t understand how some things work. And it’s fine. Good, even. Cause then, we can simplify the process or flow even more, and get a process that is user friendly for every group.
4. Complement and Illuminate Other Data Points
We can test out the reasoning behind some data points gathered from other methods. For example, if we have a heat map that shows most users are ignoring some important parts in a landing page, we can find out through UT, why they are ignoring them, because we can see how they act directly with our own two-eyes.
5. Catch Errors
As I’ve stated before, we can catch annoying errors by doing UT. We can also do this for minor errors that we overlooked/put a blind eye to when developing the product. It could also be lying in plain sight, however we do not see it from a designer/developer point of view, while the eyes of a user are usually more keen to more minor errors.
6. Develop Empathy
Basically we can develop empathy to the actual users of our product, and not personas. Working on a project might make us lose sight of our objectives, and usually we would see things from developer/designer only. By doing UT, we can see things from the user’s perspective directly.
7. Get Buy-In For Change
Website issues are one thing, but struggling users is another. When something is visibly misunderstood by users or making the struggle, of course we want to fix those things.
8. Provide Better User-Experience
Without Great User-Experience, your product would be overlooked by mostly everyone. Great UX is key for a successful product. By making everything user-friendly, your product is bound to be well-received.
UT For UKM Indonesia
Now that we’ve uncovered everything about Usability Testing, we can go on ahead and do our own UT. In this case I’m doing UT for UKM Indonesia. As I’ve said before on the Agile blog, UKM Indonesia wants to revamp their website, therefore, first off, we are gonna do Usability Testing on the landing page.
There are 3 tasks that we want users to be able to do on UKM Indonesia’s website:
- Browse through the Landing Page
- Observe each laci in the Landing Page (Kinda like navbar containing things like training, licensing, etc).
- Find suggested articles while opening articles.
Us Hipsters and Hustler are supposed to do UT ourselves. Which is a bit of a coincidence cause us 3 each found interviewees for each personas (Student, UKM Owner, and CSR). Our wonderful Hustler, Ira (not really wonderful actually), found an interviewee for the Student Persona. Our hard-working Hipster, Wahyu, found one for the UKM Owner Persona. And yours truly found one for CSR Persona (this is actually the hardest one to find). We should’ve done each interview full-team, however, because of scheduling and location conflicts, we aren’t able to do so. The alternative is for each one of us to do UT ourselves.
Actually Doing UT
Last Thursday (actually yesterday apparently), I got a chance to interview a person for one of our personas that happen to oversee most of the CSR in her office. Her name is Meyritha. The test is done to see if CSRs would be interested in using UKMIndonesia.id to scout UKMs.
When recording the responses, our group uses Google Form.
You can see it here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/154UA5jS-ontDIv7VZZnT0gb4v-gN3UcwLTf_m5aGjic/edit?usp=sharing
After interviewing CSR, I had some special notes regarding the CSR Persona:
- From a CSR point of view, helping UKMs is about educating the UKM owners, help nurturing their businesses, until they can finally grow their business themselves and finally stand on their own feet without backings from corporate.
- By showing inanimate objects on the front page, most CSR would turn their gaze elsewhere rather than look at the page, partly due to the websites not showing how to nurture UKM owners. The main focus should be the UKM owners, not their products.
Summary
And that’s about it about Usability Testing. Hopefully you are able to do Usability Testing yourself now.
Adieu~
