The Importance of Usability in Product Testing
Ultimately, UX research and usability testing saves you money. Let’s assume in this instance that our launch product is a complete entity and not one of the ever-evolving creations they are in the real world; by spotting and avoiding pitfalls and pain points along the way, you’ll deliver a finished product that works right out of the box and offers its users the experience they demand and expect.
Without well-defined and focused testing throughout the design and build processes, shareholders would face those same problems post-launch at a much higher cost. Let’s face it—nobody likes a buggy, problematic product.
A happy user experience is dependent on intuitive, friction-free journeys and flows. The goal is to remove excess steps and stages, simplify overly complex processes, and create a product that gets your user from A to B quicker, easier, and happier. Knowing what to strip out, which areas need improving, and what doesn’t work how you expected boils down to usability testing.
As we know, paying subscribers will be more than disappointed (likely frustrated and angry) when your product performance fails to keep your marketing department’s promises. With UX playing such a critical role in your bottom line, once your brand and product reputation are damaged, it’s a long and hard climb out of that particular mire.
Why is usability testing so important for digital products? Carrying out UX usability testing early and throughout the process will save you money, your teams from the frustrations of redeveloping problematic products in the field, and your users from malfunctioning or misleading journeys.
Definition of Usability Testing in UX research
Usability testing, or usability testing research, is where expert facilitators monitor a selection of users (who qualify as your target audience) while they carry out tasks using your product.
We previously wrote a page that covers a lot of what usability testing is, how it works, the typical research methods, and how to use them. We think it provides a great introduction if you’d like to know more about its components.
The Role of UX Research in Product Development
UX research and usability testing is the continual monitoring and testing that keeps you on track and out of any blinkered race to the finish line. Instead of having a teacher mark your work with a red pen like they did in the good old days, it’s your target users’ job to let you know where you’re dropping marks and what you need to do to get closer to the 100% mark you need to succeed.
As you encounter usability issues, you’ll gain insights into the product and its potential users.
- Harvesting a deeper understanding of your target users’ behaviours, desires, wants, and needs.
- Validating each component’s performance and how they work together to create a seamless and functioning product.
- Troubleshooting for pain points, problematic processes, abandonment areas, and other issues.
- Ensuring the design process is on track from early development.
- Continuing to validate needs and expectations while resolving issues through the mid-development stages.
- Checking everything works precisely as it should during the final design stages before the product launch.
- Identifying areas for improvement at every stage.
How UX Research Informs Product Design Decisions
Why can’t we just trust UX designers to test their products themselves? Well, they already understand how the product is supposed to work and are clearly aware of the correct path through each conversion funnel. Sticking to a path we can see is easy.
With user testing, we introduce our target demographics to a product they’ve never seen. They don’t know how to accomplish tasks, only what they are. Monitoring how they traverse your hopeful user flows gives a precise view of how your product will work in the real world.
We can iron out issues in the most appropriate environment—during design and testing—when we can see where our users tend to come unstuck.
Incorporating user feedback into product iterations
The flow of information during usability testing is as follows:
The facilitator observes and interviews the participants regarding specific tasks they must carry out using the product. The feedback provided by the participant guides the UX design team into the next stages of product development.
Iterating and improving the product Design: Iteration is a big word in usability testing. It’s defined as the repetition of a process or utterance and that’s where usability testing comes into its own.
Continually testing and conducting iterative testing throughout the product development process uncovers different issues at different times. Ideally, we uncover valuable insights at the most appropriate times and can resolve those issues before they impact further tasks and stages.
Understanding User Needs and Goals
The following are merely a few examples of how usability testing helps us to gain insight into our UX design process. There are countless ways to explore how your target users behave and how we should adapt new ideas and processes. Conducting user interviews, surveys, and other user research methods to gather insights is only the tip of the iceberg.
- Creating user personas to represent the target audience and understand who are our real users.
- Despite its basic functionality, card sorting is used to create the ideal information architecture, user interface, and navigation menus.
- Observing/monitoring users through designated tasks.
- First-click testing can show how many users fail to follow the expected path or funnel at the first try.
Planning an Effective Usability Test
Having a pre-defined test plan is essential to staying organised. Every test has three core elements: the facilitator, the specific tasks of the test, and your test users.
Once you’ve decided who will oversee each usability test and have taken care of recruiting participants, you need to define the test objectives and goals of the elements you need to test.
Choosing the Right Usability Testing Methods
UX research methods always require a connection with users. Whether through a questionnaire or survey, face-to-face interviews, or moderated tests, it’s essential to understand what users do and how they feel about it.
We split those research methods into defined processes to catalogue those areas.
- Qualitative vs quantitative testing approaches
- Exploratory, comparative, or evaluative testing techniques
- Moderated vs unmoderated usability testing
- Remote and in-person usability testing
We cover these areas in detail on our usability testing page. For those needing a quick recap, qualitative usability testing delivers the why behind the what, so interviews and diary studies provide long-form verbal or written explanations behind user behaviours and thought processes.
Unlike qualitative data, quantitative usability testing, on the other hand, is typically measurable numerically, so it includes clicks, conversions, visitors, error rates, task completion, bounce and abandonment rates, and so many more.
Moderated tests see UX researchers closely monitoring participants in situ or remotely; unmoderated tests leave users to their own devices.
In-person studies are conducted face-to-face at a suitable location, whereas remote usability testing involves video calls with specialist tools and software to capture what happens. Remote testing will typically include screen-sharing software to carry out tests and screen-recording software to revisit your test subjects and analyse the results.
Conducting Usability Tests
- Define your goals and clarify how testing can provide the data you need.
- Define the participant criteria and build your user pool.
- Design and create your testing process, including scripts, prototypes, questionnaires, focus tasks, and the features and components under inspection.
- Run pilot tests to find problems or shortfalls in the test process.
- Conduct the finalised tests with your target user groups.
- Synthesise the new data from your new user research.
- Analyse the results and present your findings in connection with your initial goals.
Analysing Usability Test Results
Moving to task analysis, we dissect what we’ve learned from our representative users to improve the UX design of our product.
- Organizing and interpreting qualitative feedback.
- Applying statistical analysis to quantitative data.
- Order findings in low, moderate, or critical categories and measure the frequency of occurrence.
- Compile the results into a presentation that outlines the issues, suggestions on how they can be addressed, and what the improvements will deliver.
Usability Testing Best Practices and Tips
- Ensure participant comfort and ease during testing sessions.
- Minimize bias in test facilitation and interpretation by avoiding over-explaining and limiting discussions.
- Ensure all test scripts and instructions are written in a tone and language your user groups find easy to understand.
- Stay on script. The only areas where open-ended back-and-forth discussions are more valuable are during debriefing interviews or when the facilitator experiences a major flaw or something unusual during testing.
- Evaluate the impact of usability improvements on user satisfaction metrics.
- Consider A/B testing as a strategy for measuring UX effectiveness.
- Have clearly defined success criteria.
- Highlight the key takeaways from the topic.
- Reinforce the ongoing need for user-centered design.
- Test—rinse—repeat. Continue testing updated iterations until you’re confident you’ve got the product you need.
Summary
According to the Nielsen Norman Group, the goals of usability testing usually include:
- Identifying problems in the design of the product or service
- Uncovering opportunities to improve the design
- Learning about the target user’s behaviour and preferences
It’s clear that when it comes to product testing, failing to execute thorough tests at every stage of the development process would be nothing short of careless. It provides stakeholders and product managers with the best prospect of delivering a reliable, satisfying, and pleasurable product in line with the demands of actual users.
If you would like to know more about how to deliver high-performing products and services email us at hello@ux247.com.
