Have you asked the following kinds of questions?
- My team is working on an app prototype, but we are not confident that the app would meet our customers’ needs or suit their behaviors. What can we do?
- Many customers don’t stay long on our website.Why? Is it because people can’t find what they want? is it because we don’t have the right contents? There can be many possibilities. Without knowing why, how can we improve our website?
If you have, you should usability test your prototypes or live products.
Usability testing in a nutshell
Usability testing is to observe how real users use your product. The goal is to find your design issues and enhancement opportunities through the observations.
A typical usability test project involves:
- Recruit your real users.
- Design the tasks to test.
- Run the tests(1 user per test).
- Observe how the users use your product in the tests. Find the design issues and make design recommendations.
To learn more about usability testing, come to the “Introduction to Usability Testing” class on Sep 2 (Monday).
What can usability testing do that other evaluation methods can’t?
Analytics —
- You gather analytic data after your product launch.X% drop-off rate means that your design has driven away X% of your real customers. Analytics cannot prevent poor design from releasing to the market.
- Analytics does not tell you why your customers drop off.
You can usability test your prototypes and refine your designs effectively before releasing your product to the market. No need to lose customers in order to find out your design issues.
Focus groups —
You can’t rely on your customers to tell you your design issues. They don’t design your product.
- People often don’t realize that they use your features wrongly.
- People often blame themselves for failing to use your product, or think that the usage problems are minor and not worth reporting.
- People may not be able to tell you enough details about the usage problems to help you fix the design issues.
Usability testing lets you find your design issues by observing what your users do (not what they say they do) and by understanding why they do what they do.
UX expert reviews —
UX consultants can certainly walk through your product and tell you a variety of design issues. However, we have limitations:
- We can’t think or behave exactly like your users. Our training and work have rewired our brains. We are not your typical users.
- We may not have the necessary domain knowledge to find the domain-specific design issues and give effective recommendations. For instance, I don’t know about horse racing. I can find some general design issues on the Jockey Club website, but can’t evaluate how optimal the race results are displayed for the gamblers.
Usability testing enables your users, who have the necessary domain knowledge, to simply be themselves to use your product. You and your UX consultant can find the domain-specific issues, and other design issues that typical users face.
Make usability testing compulsory, and test frequently.
I urge you to make usability testing a compulsory and frequent activity in your product development and maintenance cycles. Doing so will help you allocate time and other resources to do the tests, and develop a more customer-caring culture in your business.
To learn more about usability testing, come to the “Introduction to Usability Testing” class on Sep 2 (Monday).
Written by Ada Yuen, Senior Usability Consultant and Co-Founder, AddiThink
If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail Ada Yuen
