Usability Testing
[Welcome class, to the Hustler’s second lesson]
Before you start with any fixed design, it would be important to do a usability testing during the design process. Usability testing is the process of evaluating how your design is used, how easy it is for the user and the overall impression given by the users. Usually it involves a participant, in our case a persona, doing a test consisting on instructions of things to do on the website while an observer watches and notes down what the participant does, comments, problems they’ve encountered and any confusions while doing the instructions. Often times, usability testing is conducted repeatedly from the start of the design process to the end.
Benefits of Usability Testing
The main benefit or purpose of usability testing is to identify any problems in the current design as early as possible in the design process. There are also other benefits or advantages such as,
- minimizing risk of the product not meeting the expectation of the user,
- resolving any internal debates regarding the design since the issue can be tested with a user to see their reaction towards it,
- any issue or potential problems can be highlighted before the design is used,
and many more that involves the results of testing the design during the design process.
Disadvantages of Usability Testing
Although usability testing gives quite the amount of benefits, there are also disadvantages that must be noted to ensure that no one places their reliance on the right path. Firstly, usability testing doesn't 100% accurately represent actual real life scenarios on how users are to use certain websites. Usability testing is mostly qualitative, in which they don’t really give a vast amount of feedback about the design compared to something like a survey, but the feedbacks they do give can be more accurate and insightful to the designers.
Usability testing can be used in different ways during your processes and although they don’t give the most accurate representation of real life scenarios, they are the best method that can make sure your website supports the intended users in their goals quickly and easily. As such, the creators can be sure that they are developing a successful product. Now, how do you do usability testing?
Build a Prototype to Be Tested
Well, without any prototype or product to be tested how could you do any usability testing? It’s called usability testing not usability assumption.
Making a prototype of the design is the fasted way to create something to be tested. Any type of prototype is fine, whether it’s a low-fidelity wireframe or even a high-fidelity prototype. At least the prototype should have a type of concept or flow that is going to be presented so that they can be improved, built upon or even discarded depending on the result of the testing. During the process of making the prototype, one should also make it according to their intended users with some functionalities that are planned to be implemented so that they could be tested.
Make The Questionnaire and Recruit Participants
Before starting the testing process, drafting a set of questions would be beneficial. This helps the flow during the actual testing process. Some questions could be as simple as asking about how the current design is, or even about the color combinations, to instructions such as going through X buttons, try to find Y, etc,. This helps figure out how the overall look of the design is according to the users and also how user friendly the design is.
After some questionnaires are created, recruiting participants can be the next step. Without any participants there would be no one who would test the product. This process would be fairly easy if you are familiar with your target user or ideal persona. If you’ve attended the 1st lesson about persona, then that would mean you’ve at least tried to make a persona. You can then search for a willing participant according to the persona made. Recruiting can take quite a while and there aren’t exactly advices on how to find them other than advertising. It would be way faster if you are someone with quite a lot of connections.
Testing
Testing can be done either remotely or in-person. Either way, both types would need an allotted time to be emptied to for the testing. The testing process would not always go smoothly and as expected and as such it would be best to have some kind of backup plan incase of such incidents happening. During in-person testing, while the participant carry out their test you as the observer would have to closely watch the participants every move and write down some notes about it so that it can be documented later. Remote testing however, don’t need any observers and the participant would write down their thoughts on the questionnaire themselves.
From this, it could be said that remote testing would give the more accurate feedback because sometimes doing something while being observed will keep them from doing the things they would usually do while using the product alone, in-person testing would give more pressure to the participant. However, different problems could arise with both methods so one should be prepared for it.
Document Result and Improve or Fix
After the test, you need to document the result gathered. This is the most important step, because it highlights what would be needed to be improved or fixed. Summarizing and compiling the gather result would be quite time consuming so it would be wise to not rush this step and always double check the results. Your findings can be documented in different ways such as,
- using a spreadsheet,
- audio recording,
- surveys filled by participant,
- error or success rate percentages
Based on this information you could then make a presentation highlighting the result of the testing.
Lastly, you can then put your findings to use. This part would be the process of improving the current design and fixing any bugs or errors that were found by the test participant. From here you can then create a design that would be user friendly to your intended audiences and a reflection of the audiences expectations.
This would be it for todays lesson, hope it is quite informative. See you on the next lesson! Arrivederci!
