Usability testing

Usability testing is a lot like giving your digital product a trial run. It’s an essential part of UX (User Experience) research that ensures your website or app isn’t just good on paper – it’s user-friendly in real life, too.  

It’s all about letting actual users take your product for a spin and seeing how they find the experience. But it’s not just about finding issues – it’s about finding solutions. We’re here to turn those insights into action, making your customers’ user experience even better.  

With so much competition in the modern market, usability testing isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s a must. It’s the secret sauce that allows you to really get to grips with your users’ needs and preferences, helping you create digital solutions that are functional, intuitive, and enjoyable.  

Without usability testing, it’s like designing in the dark. You could create a product that looks great in theory but falls flat in practice due to poor usability. Usability testing is the torch that lights the way, helping you design with confidence and making sure your product is in tune with your users’ needs.

Each round will be different depending on what the main challenge is that we are testing, but usually, there are four main phases to a 60-minute usability test

Warmup and background 

First, we will ask general questions about the respondent. This is not only an icebreaker but also to confirm which personas they might belong to as well as confirm some of the items they answered on the screener.

In-depth customer interview

We don’t just test the interface in a usability test. In the beginning, we spend time understanding your customers’ behaviours, motivations and feelings. We can delve into the nuances of why they chose a certain product or how they feel about a brand.

Task-based scenarios 

We will ask them to complete certain tasks we have decided on in the testing plan. While they complete these tasks, we’re keenly observing, taking note of any problem areas or places where users get stuck. For example, test users might struggle to find the CHECKOUT button. In these instances, our team members ask guiding questions such as “What’s going on now?” or “Where to next?” to elicit more information about the user’s experience. These questions are not designed to frustrate the test user but rather to investigate tricky spots which may have been overlooked.

Wrap-up

We will ask for final thoughts about the overall experience. Usability tests can’t prove if customers will definitely use something outside of the test, but it’s sometimes rather interesting to ask them to imagine themselves using it tomorrow to see what they come up with.

Depending on what we want to learn and the fidelity of the designs we are testing, there are a few techniques we can use within usability testing.

Concept test

We use this when we want to test a concept of a solution, rather than the interface itself. The concept test is the closest to generative research we have in usability testing. It does not require a fully designed prototype, and arguably it should not be too ‘designed’. We just need something to help explain the general idea of the solution. This could be a video, an advert, a simple drawing or a storyboard.

Prototype test

This is the most common type of usability test and usually includes some of the concept areas as well as larger interactions on the interface. With a prototype test, we focus on comprehension, learnability, information hierarchy, choice architecture, and value proposition. Even within prototype testing, we can have different fidelity levels of prototypes depending on what we learn. The more conceptual we need to test, the lower the fidelity needs to be, but the more detailed and interaction-based the test is, the higher the fidelity needs to be.

Live site test

This is the most statistically driven test with detailed task analysis. We look at the time it takes to complete specific actions and the success vs failure rate. This is the most accurate representation of what your customers will actually be experiencing with load times, real data, and a fully functional front end.

Usability tests are great at finding out problems in a design or customer journey. What it can’t do is prove that a customer will definitely use it or how much they will pay for it, outside of the test.

Usability testing will ensure that you don’t have obstacles in the way of a customer completing their transaction. It will help you understand why customers are behaving a certain way, or why they are dropping off at a certain point of your journey.  It’s possible to deduce how customers, similar to the ones we tested, will behave in these scenarios, but because we don’t know how large the target market is, we can’t guarantee that behaviour will happen in your entire customer base.

Usability testing, like all qualitative research, pairs very nicely with quantitative data. Your analytics can tell you what customers are doing and usability tests will tell you why, as well as give suggestions to improve their behaviour. Your analytics will then validate if your iterations are successful.