Usability Testing: The key to product success

Have you ever used a product, service or interface that was difficult to understand, hard to use, and ultimately made you discontinue its usage because your expectations were not met?  

Have you ever thought why Google Search Engine is preferred by people of all age groups across the world over its competitors?

In today’s competitive market, whether it is telecom, aviation, banking or healthcare industry, every product and service tries their best to thrive in the market, but only the ones who succeed exactly knows what their users want and in what way a user expects to use a product, service or interface, without any hindrance, hesitation, or question. In other words, we can say, a product is successful when undergone proper usability testing.

What is Usability Testing?

Usability means how easy and intuitive it is to use an interface. Usability Testing refers to evaluating a product or service by testing it with representative users who give direct input on how real users use the system. The International Standards for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) (ISO 9241-11) define usability as the “effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction of a user performance within a specific context, such as physical and social environment.”

Usability testing consists of 5 main quality components:

• Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
• Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
• Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
• Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
• Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

Usability testing usually involves systematic observation under controlled conditions to determine how well people can use the product. The main aim of these tests is to consummate the normal tasks (preferably 3-5 at a time) to users while observers watch, listen and take notes. Consummating the tasks help gather qualitative and quantitative data, signal out probable usability issues or define the user's satisfaction with the product. Although usability testing is performed with questionnaire design, a Six-Sigma methodology [pdf] can also be applied by leveraging the framework of defining user goals, measuring how well the current interface meets the goals, analyzing root causes of usability problems and quantifying improved solutions.

Why test Usability?

Because designers are not the ultimate users

It is impossible for the designers to understand the desires, needs, troubles, and choices of users while designing from within a vacuum. Since designers are not the ultimate users, they are not able to realize and see things from users point of view. Usability testing is helpful because it helps understand the actual behavioral patterns and user feedbacks as opposed to solely relying on the assumptions and prescribed solutions by clients or designers.

Because it’s better to prevent than to cure

Usability testing conducted at early stage helps the designers determine whether they are on the right track or not. Even before final release of the product, it is better to test and resolve the issues from user’s end by usability testing, then to ruin the brand and company image after the final product release. Although, it is true that the changes can still be made in the designs after building a fully interactive prototype or setting the design directions, but as it is good to prevent a disease rather than cure it afterwards, so is usability testing good for the designs.

Because designing and development is not cheap

Many people work together as a team throughout the development cycle of a product and the involvement expands as the stages of the product lifecycle progresses. Early stage usability testing assures that the time, effort, and cost spent in design and development is not time wasted, saving the cost, time and efforts of redesign.

Because “Users” can make or break the success of any product / service

A client or company can attract or force the users initially to use their product or service, but they cannot stop them from looking for workarounds or switch to their competitors if the ultimate users are not happy with the product or service. It is only and only the ultimate users who can determine the success or failure of your services.

When to perform Usability Testing?

If resources permit, it is always better to perform usability at the earliest and at every milestone of the project, whether in the form of card sorting or tree testing to determine the organization of content, or usability testing with paper prototypes, low-fidelity prototypes, and finally, high-fidelity prototypes.

When done before redesigning, usability testing of the existing product can provide all sorts of ideas for the redesign. It helps identify the biggest pain points of the current offering. If budget and time permits, it is also better to look at competitor’s products and put them through usability tests too. Competing product’s usability testing tells what works really well for the users and identify any areas which don’t work, saving time and efforts of trying these ideas yourselves.

Even testing during the redesign, when there’s no finished product to play with, can save a fortune in development time. Testing of sketches, wireframes and prototypes helps to know if an idea has the mileage to really be valuable or whether there lies as misinterpretation to what users really wanted form the product.

Finally, when the nice shiny product is ready, it is put through its pace before the release in front of the costumers, not to test the functionality (that’s normally a function of quality assurance), but to test the experience with that functionality.

Best Environment for Usability? 

Best environment to conduct usability testing is in the field, going to the users and observing them perform tasks in their natural environment. Field studies are not only better for gathering information about people’s behavior, real-life tasks, and contexts of use, but also lets us observe people trying to use a product, which is the best way to evaluate a product’s user experience.

While testing in a usability lab offers its own advantages, tests can be conducted almost anywhere. Remote usability testing is another way to include participants in cases where they are not able to travel. This makes it easier to reach to the right participants, which is much more important than testing in person on non-relevant users.

Is usability as easy as it sounds?

Although, the basics of usability testing sounds simple, doing it well is much more complicated than it seems. It involves a lot of hard work, cleverness, and coordination in planning, facilitating, observing, listening, taking notes, analyzing, and recommending the right solutions.

Some studies are solely about task completion, task time, and errors; but most usability studies also explore participants’ feelings about an overall user interface and the problems that they encounter when using it, and examine whether a product meets their needs.

Also, just determining the metrics is not as useful for all test except to understand the frequency with which problems occur. However, for all usability tests, especially for formative testing, why problems occur is far more important than any metrics because understanding “why” leads to recommendations that enable designers to solve problems.

What to avoid during testing?

Unrealistically cramming too many tasks or questions into each session often leads to poor testing results as the users run out of time before covering everything. Also, the facilitator may have to skip tasks or rush through each session to fit in as much as possible, which doesn’t leave much time to ask probing questions about problems or gather more meaningful information from the users. So, it’s better to focus on fewer tasks and questions, leaving enough time for yourself to explore the reasons behind participants’ actions. Focus only on what is most important to learn at a time is more important than trying to cover everything in one session.

Comparative testing (testing different designs at a time) to evaluate different design alternatives is sometimes helpful, but people may get carried away after trying to test too many different versions of a design solution. This increases the complexity of the sessions for both the facilitator and the participants. Testing multiple versions requires either testing with a large number of participants where each user uses a different version or having each participant use multiple versions. The more versions that each participant experiences, the harder it becomes for them to distinguish between the versions. Testing multiple versions also requires more time, which limits the number of tasks that participants can perform during a session.

Changing tasks or changing the design based on the results of just a few participants is often a bad idea. It does not help clearly state whether something is a problem, and analysis becomes difficult when too few participants have experienced the same tasks using the same user interface when changes are made midstream. So, unless there’s a problem with the prototype or the tasks, it’s better to keep things same throughout testing and see what all of the participants do. Alternatively, instead of making changes in the middle of a test cycle, to divide testing into two or more rounds with fewer participants or have a pre- test of the tasks and survey is a better option. This way the surveys, questionnaires or the tools are checked, not affecting the final test results.

Is usability alone enough for successful product launch?

Usability testing is a great problem identification method with an existing design, but it doesn’t give an in-depth understanding of the users, their contexts of use, or their needs. Also, usability is neither meant to test the functionality of the product, nor is used to identify bugs (because it is usually taken care of by QA team). Usability testing alone is not adequate for product development, but observational user research and market research within the users’ own context is necessary to understand user’s needs. Besides, proper functionality QA testing before the final release cannot be replaced by usability.

Usability testing is not just a milestone to be checked off on the project schedule, but it is an essential component of design and feature selection which tells about the open areas of opportunities, also improving the final return on investments.

Since, Usability testing can be done in many different ways, it’s important for the team to determine a goal for why they are testing. The selection of the right set of users who truly represent the actual users and proper implementation of the results are another important aspect of usability testing.

No matter at what stage your product is, remember that it will flourish on the feedbacks, so don’t leave it on the shelf to stale as days go by.

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