Learning about Usability Testing

What is Usability Testing?

It's a method used in UX Research to evaluate different types of products or services by testing how they work with certain users. The main goal of these types of tests is to view how the product behaves when being used by different individuals as well as to identify potential issues and get feedback on how the user feels when trying to accomplish different types of tasks.

Key areas of Usability Testing

Creating a great product requires testing.

• The people who are constantly building the product are often biased and can overlook certain decisions they make. Testing can help to view how different people who aren't familiar or biased with the product use it and identify areas of improvement that otherwise would've been difficult to see.

Test early, even if it's one user

• Testing early can help to identify quickly different things that could remain overlooked and could create a bigger problem if the design starts to revolve around them and in the future they become difficult to fix.

How to choose my users?

Choosing users to test the ideas that we're creating can be crucial depending on the product. Some products require specific types of people that can use them while others appeal to a wider audience. It's important to know what you're building first and understand what kinds of users could end up using the product. Try to look for users that match your market, but don't get too attached to that idea or you can end up having a product that would work well with a knowledgeable user, but a beginner would struggle, and having new users could become troublesome.

Where and how do we test?

Nowadays technology has made things easier for people to test products. Certain platforms can even help you with submitting designs and selecting the types of users that you'd like to have and receive comments and it's a good thing to have, but it's also important to keep the human factor intact and try to have a webcam session with them to view how they interact with the product, the expressions they make and the way they speak about it. Doing tests in person can provide better insights, but at least in a virtual meeting, you can get a good understanding of the user's experience.

What do we test?

In this area, if you can, you could even test products from competitors to try to understand the struggles that users can have with them and look for ways to solve them with the product you want to create. When you're redesigning a product, test the product before it moves forward to production to review possible issues as well. Once you start designing, start looking at possible tasks that the user can perform within the prototype. They can be isolated tasks or part of a bigger flow, and it's also important to give them enough information to get them to perform the task, but not much so they won't be completely guided.

What to do after a test?

After conducting the test, you'll gather information on how users interact with the product. These can be answers from multiple choice questions, the time they spent in each module and you could even get comments you didn't even think about. Once you have all the input data, start compiling it to identify certain patterns (good or bad) and create a list with every problem detected to rank them from most urgent to least urgent. After this, it's up to you and your team to prioritize which issues can be fixed first, which ones can be left on hold, and which ones can live as they are.

The Eisenhower Matrix is a great concept that you can apply to prioritize things to do.

What did we learn?

Usability Testing can help us gather input from users to understand how our product works and how can it be improved. It's important to always take this into account and try to implement it whenever possible, even if the amount of users we have to test is small. This type of testing will reveal information that we could've ignored or thought of it differently, so performing this evaluation can help us get closer to a more refined product catered to our user's needs.