The complete guide to conduct usability testing

In this world where consumer is the king, usability and user experience has become the topmost priority of the businesses across the globe. It has become a weapon of getting the competitive edge among companies by keeping the user at the center of their business model. Companies want their products to be the easiest to use, with maximum features. This is achieved by teams working day and night to deliver the best experience to their users. But as famously said by usability expert Jacob Nielson:

It is clear that despite the increasing focus of the companies towards providing the easiest to use solution to their customers, they are trying to achieve this by without involving users in the key decision-making process. Some of the design led organizations across the world have realized the mistake they are committing and have created a method with which they can ensure that they are delivering the best user experience.

Usability testing is a method of testing the ease of use of a product or service where users are involved early in the design phase itself to test designs and identifying the defects and improving it. This helps business to save cost in a way that the cost of correcting a flaw in the design phase is much less than to bear the cost of delivering a badly designed solution to the users.

"The cost of correcting the flaw in the design phase is 100x less than than cost of correcting a flaw post everything is created of developed"

To understand any topic in depth you need to have answers to the What, the When, How and Where of it. So, without wasting much time let's dive into this.

"The What"

What is Usability Testing?

As Wikipedia states:

Usability testing refers to evaluating a product or service by testing it with the target users. Typically, during a test, participants will try to complete typical tasks while observers watch, listen and takes notes. The goal is to identify any usability problems, collect qualitative and quantitative data and determine the participant's satisfaction with the product. This data then converts into actionable items for improving the product or service. Once all the action items and user feedback is taken into consideration, it again goes through testing and the cycle repeats until the users are completely satisfied with the product or service.

"The When"

When to do Usability Testing?

Taking reference from HCD tool kit, a typical user centered design process looks like this:

A user centered design process begins from the empathize phase where a designer steps in the shoes of the users to understand the problems faced by the users. Entire user research is done in this step to identify all the pain points. These pain points are then analyzed to define the problem statement for the design team. A sample problem statement could be like "Design a low cost mobile device to measure blood pressure for diabetic patients."

Once the problem statement is defined, the team then ideates on all the possible solutions to solve the problem. The focus here is not on the feasibility of the solutions but on the quantity of unique out of box solutions. Post the ideation is done, prototypes are developed for the best 2-3 promising ideas. Now this is a right place for usability testing to be done in the design phase itself. A couple of usability testing iterations in the design phase and a couple again post product development should ideally suffice the shipping criterion for a product.

"The How"

How to do Usability Testing?

Now here things start to get serious and subject matter experts come in to carry out a proper usability test which gives the best insights. There are various ways in which a usability testing can be carried out:

Now there are several types of usability tests which can be done to identify the user acceptance ratio. The choice of a usability test depends on the variety of factors like the product, target audience, feedback sought etc. Here are some of the conditions where a one or combination of tests can help you identify the design flaws and come up with the best design for your users.

"The Where"

Where to do Usability testing?

Now depending upon the complexity of the product or service being tested, usability tests can be carried out either remotely or onsite. It also depends upon the amount and kind of test data you need to capture. If you want to collect data like heat maps, answers to questions, preferences between options, navigation flow comprehension then a remote usability testing would be sufficient enough. But let's just say you have designed a safety mechanism interface for a nuclear power plant, you would want to capture much more granular level of data like cognitive load, error rate, eye tracking etc. For capturing such details of usability data, there has to be a testing setup which is a replica of the actual usage environment. The testing setup may also include data capturing instruments like an eye tracking machine.

With this I hope you would have got an overview of usability testing and all the peculiarities involved. I hope you enjoyed reading this article. Thanks for your time and feel free to add your comments below and let me know your thoughts about this article.