Created by Julia Hanke

Mobile User Experience Testing Guide: Tools and Tips

Dmitry Gaiduk
UXReality Blog
Published in
7 min readAug 9, 2019

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The user experience specialists (UX) lead the position in the design of websites and mobile applications focused on the client. Since UX has become an integral part of digital product design, there is a paradigm shift in user research and its techniques.

Today, modern companies must move from the old advertising methods that shout threshed slogans in large bold letters, such as “Test X. We are the best! ”Or they risk being left behind.

The obvious problem with this outdated and slow approach is that there are too many comparable products on the market that also claim to be “the best” in their respective product categories.

To survive in a world overwhelmed by competition, companies must invest in the development of their websites, applications, services and other points of contact with customers around global user experience. And the best way to evaluate the potential user experience is by doing a user investigation.

We are also going to talk about the tips that will help you improve your user experience.

Created by Julia Hanke

Tools to make Usability Tests

Are you looking for tools to help you do UX Research? In this post, I share what are some tools that you and your team can use to carry them out, as well as the differences between the features they offer.

Lookback

Lookback offers face-to-face or remote tests (moderate or automated) for websites, prototypes (Invision, Marvel, Proto.io) or mobile apps (iOS, Android). It allows to invite observers (to see the sessions in real-time) they also offer unlimited participants per test.

The problem with Lookback is that the user must have the google chrome plugin installed for you to be able to use it. Knowing that some users do not use google chrome and it will sound so weird to ask them to install the plugins in their computer system.

UXReality

The two awards winning user testing tool UXReality is the most reliable when it comes to tracking user behavior because it tracks the eye movement. The concept of eye-tracking allows you to monitor and record how a person looks at a particular scene or image, specifically in what areas they focus, for how long and what order they follow in their visual exploration.

UXReality is the app that not only tracks the eye movement but also takes a record of mobile behavior tracking features such as voice, scroll, gaze plot, emotions and click flow recordings with webcam Eye Tracking, Voice Recording, Facial Coding, and Surveys. This is the best tool to use for your user experience because it collects both quantitative and qualitative. It is also very easy to use by anyone whether and there is also a free trial.

Taperecorder

This is another tool for testing UX of your mobile app. It is mainly used for apple applications and android. It is a good tool for performing user texting that can collect data from many users as possible.

They record the activity of the users of your app so that you will watch later and know what their interest is. The major problem with them is that their service is very expensive when compared to other platforms that are as good as them.

Mixpanel

All you need to do is to install Mixpanel’s library on your site and start tracking your user’s actions. However, the installation is not always easy to do, it takes much time and a bit tricky to perform. Mixpanel will be perfect for you if you want a simple, yet a potent tool for your SaaS product. One of the major setbacks is the difficulty of implementation — you will need a software developer to implement the Mixpanel library on your app or website.

Tobii

Tobii provides insights into human behavior and intuitive user interfaces and it is the world leader in terms of overall market share and patent portfolio. It has its pros and cons. Pros — the quality and reliability of eye-tracking insights, cons — it’s quite an expensive solution that requires expensive hardware (you need to equip the lab). They also don’t offer a free trial.

Inspectlet

When talking about user system Inspectlet is one of the best tools to mention. They record the video of what users do in your website capturing everything that they do including the movement of mouse and clicks, keypress and scroll. They provide only click-based heatmaps which are worse than heatmaps based on eye-tracking. Another shortcoming is that it is applicable to only windows phones.

Remember, the tool is a means, but the important thing is the analysis.

Tips To Improve Your User Experience Testing

Each point of interaction of a user with a company, its products and services are considered user experience. Consequently, the main objective of a website should be to satisfy visitors and meet their specific needs without demanding much effort, commitment or reasoning.

In order to improve the user experience and optimize mobile website as much as possible, it’s necessary to conduct UX testing. Try the following tips.

Created by Julia Hanke

Goal Setting & Test Protocol

Through the test protocol, the consultant translates your objectives and transforms them into test & problem hypotheses. He then determines all the scenarios and things that will be or data that will be collected. These elements are presented to you for validation before the tests. Some examples of user test for website: Design and general ergonomics, the tree structure, the fluidity of the courses, the relevance of the contents, the perception of the offer and the brand image, the competitive advantages, the reinsurance, the desire to use the service or purchase.

Who to Recruit

At first, we define with you the target to test on a set of general criteria (Customers, prospects, gender, age, CSP) and specific. Users are chosen from your target heart.

Collect and analyze eye tracking data

Eye Tracking is a powerful tool for user researchers and, when used properly, can provide knowledge that is unattainable by other research methods. The most obvious ability of the eye tracking, however unique, is that the location of the eyes of the study participant can be traced.

Eye tracking is an essential tool that can be combined with any biometric measurement; These measurements are useless unless they are analyzed in the context of what the user is observing. Measuring time in conjunction with eye movement is key to understanding exactly when and what the participant is looking at. While eye tracking is revealing, it can tell you what the user is looking at, what they notice and what CTR’s are unnoticeable. This will help you in the collection of data on how the user perceives your mobile website.

Measure your mobile users’ emotions

Emotional tracking is crucial to measure users unconscious reactions to create truly great user experience on mobile. This is very important in known when your users are encountering problems and which area of your website or the mobile application is giving them a hard time to navigate. With this information, you will be able to put things in place and make your property more user-friendly which will, in turn, drive you more conversions and sells in the case of eCommerce websites and mobile stores.

Track your real users’ journey on mobile

The deliverable contains the analysis of the elements identified during the tests. You can find the difficulties of users, their expectations, but also suggestions for improvements. All recommendations are prioritized and grouped by thematic, depending on the time of implementation/importance in improving the user experience. Each point is explained and illustrated using video, verbatim or eye-tracking data.

The analysis of the participants’ eye movements during the first 10 seconds on the homepage is, therefore, a decisive indicator: the heat map shows that several zones attract visual attention (in particular all the tabs and buttons because the user knows that they can navigate and therefore want to know their title which indicates the destination).

Takeaway

It is known that in a very short time (a few seconds!), The user gets an idea of the contents of the site he visits, his interest for him and decides to continue his exploration or abandon it (thing that he can do with a simple click of the mouse, sometimes cruel …).

Created by Julia Hanke

This test, which is quite simple to set up and realize, has brought to light a large number of issues, thanks to the collection of objective and quantitative data (by Eye Tracking) and to the addition of qualitative information provided by the satisfaction of just two cameras.

And current tools (like UXReality and Taperecorder as mentioned above) can help you do mobile UX testing fast and easily. With this most of the analysis is done automatically, no need for all the stress involved in the analysis. Online webcam eye tracking using is the solution to user experience testing.

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UXReality Blog
UXReality Blog

Published in UXReality Blog

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Dmitry Gaiduk
Dmitry Gaiduk

Written by Dmitry Gaiduk

Research Professional | Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer at CoolTool, Co-founder at UXReality