An Overview of Usability Testing

Usability Testing is a user-centered testing method for evaluating the performance of a product. This test is conducted upon the real users to understand the ease of using any product, website, or app. During the test, the observers will give some particular tasks to the participants and the observers will observe their performances and listen to them whether they face any problem or not. If many participants experience similar types of problems this will indicate that there are usability issues with the product. Therefore, to understand the satisfaction of the participants and to recognize the usability problems, usability testing is essential.

Types of Usability Testing:

Depending on the purpose of conducting usability research, usability testing can be of two types such as- i) Comparative Usability Testing, ii) Explorative Usability Testing.
i) Comparative Usability Testing: This test helps to compare a website with the competitor sites. Besides comparing with the competitors, this test can be effective to compare two designs.
ii) Explorative Usability Testing: This usability testing helps to understand the needs of the users and whether a product should add any further functionality. Therefore, during this testing, the users test a variety of services and advise on what design efforts should be added to get the advantage of the market.

The Ease of Use:

The usability testing actually helps to determine the ease of use of a website. Therefore, this test helps to understand how a website is easily usable and how it helps the users to fulfill their goals. In comparison to the traditional test, this test is effective to understand what users want and like. Because, in the usability test, real customers and users takeparticipation, whereas, the traditional tests used to collect the feedback of end-users and were conducted by developers, project managers, or designers. Thus, usability test is more bias-free test than the traditional tests.

Benefits:

The usability testing helps to identify the earlier issues and problems before making the products or website publicly available. Therefore, through this testing, one can fix the problem after identification. There are several advantages of this testing such as-

i) From this testing, one can understand whether the participants can complete their tasks using the website or not.

ii) You can also know the time of fulfilling a task.

iii) Receiving direct feedback will help to recognize the satisfaction of the participants.

iv) This test will help you to realize what changes you need to make in order to improve the satisfaction of the users and the performance of the website.

v) Analysis of the performance will help to assess how the website is suitable to fulfill the usability objectives.

vi) This testing is effective to discuss different options and opportunities. One can also avoid potential problems before the launch of the product.

Costs:

In order to conduct the usability testing, there is no necessity to have a formal lab. The cost of the test mainly depends on the size of the team, the number of testing days, and the number of participants. Despite the cost, usability testing is effective to understand how easily your website or any product is fulfilling the goals of the users.