Usability tests can be done with physical products or services as well as with prototypes. Feedback is used to improve the solution. It is very important to be sure that your product or service is easy to use and that desired tasks can be completed. If not, people will be likely to leave and go to a competitor’s site.
A good method to test this is usability testing. This is a method of evaluating a website or app by testing it with real users who are part of the target audience. Usability tests evaluate the overall user experience by measuring the relative ease with which end users can accomplish a set of tasks that a typical user would need to accomplish.
The primary purpose of a usability test is to gather the data needed to identify usability issues and improve your design. There are few steps that you need to follow for usability testing:
- Test as early as possible: the earlier you test, the easier it is to make changes.
- Outline your objectives: before starting a usability test you should be crystal clear on your goals. Always ask yourself: what are you trying to learn?
- Carefully prepare questions And Tasks: once you have an objective, you can define which tasks you’ll need to test in order to answer your questions or validate your hypothesis and assumptions.
- You need a scenario for the respondents to accomplish a set of tasks that you want to test. For example signing up or inviting a friend or making a purchase.
- The respondents try to accomplish this set of tasks, while thinking out loud. Stimulate them with open questions, to let them explain themselves.
- While the respondents try to complete the given tasks, the observers watch and/or measure their overall success in accomplishing those goals and look to identify usability problems. They can either take notes while observing or record the session with audio or (screen)video.
- The observers take notes of where the users succeed and where they encounter troubles, so this can be used as input to make improvements in the user flow.
Tools Usability Testing
Video Usability Testing
