Usability Testing – A best practice

“Don’t guess everything is just perfect. Know early, Test early & Fail early.”

Usability testing most often overlooked by stakeholders, but it can assure immense value gained from it. You can find good content, excellent images, much professional looks (i.e. for Web & Mobile), but Are they enough to build great “Customer Satisfaction”?

What is Usability Testing?

Usability Testing is the best approach to understand how real users experience your website or application. Usability Testing focuses on measuring the intended purpose for which a product or service has designed.

Everyone has his and her own preferences; as with everything in life, different approach work for different people and different tasks. In this article, I’m going to discuss more about Usability Testing types as well as providing you screenshots of where someone has performed on the screen, i.e Heat Mapping, Click test, Navigation test & more. This can help you see if your website or application is presented in a logical manner, easy to navigate, easy to use, and having an enjoyable experience.

Just keep in mind while designing any website, application & product, and realize that a poor website lead an impact on people as poor service rendered in any other way.
Lets talk about some common Usability testing types in brief.

• First Click Test
• Moderated / One to One Test
• Heat Map Test
• Scroll Test
• Preference Test or A/B Testing
• Navigation Test

Types of Usability Testing

1. Click Test:

First click is important. Click test has designed to measure where the user or participants clicks first in order to complete a specific task. This test measures whether user clicks on right place for which a website or application designed. Example:

When to Use click testing?

• When there is Negative impact by too-similar link labels.
• Can’t able to find hidden top task link.
• When you have to check effectiveness of the linking structure of your Website.

2. Moderated / One to One Test:
In this test a moderator will sit with you while you are performing your live task, answering your question posted and capturing your real time feedbacks. Example:

When to Moderated / One to One Test?
Moderated testing ask more efforts, so it is more beneficial and recommended to use in earlier stage of design.

• When you have incomplete or buggy interfaces
• When you have Complex Interfaces
• When you have product with security concerns

3. Heat Map Test:

Heat Map testing is a 2D- graphical data representation in which values are shown in colors. A bunch of colors provides a visual summary of information. Also it gives an indication which information has widely used by users or participants. Example:

Heavy Interaction
Moderate Interaction
Less Interaction

4. Scroll Test:

This test is intended to map scrolling on website to some folds. It will help to understand how much a user will scroll to a webpage. Example:

5. Preference or A/B Test:

This test is intended to know the user preference. You provide participants or users two different choices and ask them which one they prefer and why. This is most common & easy Usability testing across globe. Example:

6. Navigation test:

Navigation Tests is a multi-step process for user or participants to complete particular step of task. You have to define the areas that are made as a successful click at each step. Example:

What stage of process to start Usability Testing?

When you’re going through initial design phase, it’s very difficult to say this design helps to generate Customer Satisfaction or add value to your business. With a small usability test you’ll to discover and focuses on those areas, which leads you to create usable design and will add more value to business.

It’s never a bad time to start Usability Testing. At least once a month, this helps you in gathering fresh and relevant information. Even if you re-run the same test you may end up with finding different results and discover new small changes that you’re thinking to do can make big difference. Each change will add up small value consider 1%, but you will find at the end that Usability helps to increase your revenue with 20 % or 30%.
Why not starts Today ☺?

How we use Usability Testing?

When we’re designing, we should test our designs early (even in the wire-framing & prototyping stage) to ensure your design strength and to show clients the usability of our designs. This also helps to get involved clients very early on in the process and helps developing a user centric website or application. It also helps to show another of our unique distinction and gives us a unique selling point for our services or product.

In Summary

The design industry is a pretty crowded and competitive place. While you can stand out on your unique and fantastic design alone, the more you can add value to your services (within reason), and the more easy & usable you can make your designs, the better you will do in the future long term. Think of design as a quiz & puzzle – Usability Testing may be just one piece of improving your design, but you can’t complete the design without improving every last part of design.