Usability Testing in A Mind Map
Usability testing is the evaluative research that helps to understand the problems users might come across when interacting with your product and their level of satisfaction. In the usability testing, the users are given some tasks to complete and when they are at work, observers encourage them to think aloud to understand what they think and take note of their body language, facial expressions, emotions. Usability testing is an important stage in UX design and with the data collecting in this stage, we could figure out usability issues with a product.
The most effective way of understanding what works and what doesn’t in an interface is to watch people use it. This is the essence of usability testing.
- Nielsen Norman Group
In this post, I outline the key points in understanding the usability testing, from common mistakes, how to conduct the test to the tips in writing the scripts. If you are wondering what is usability testing and how to conduct it, or if you are interested in a knowledge map of usability testing, ?? this mind map may help you. The rest of this article is a detailed explanation of the map.
Why the Usability is Important
According to Quovantis, usability testing reduces the risk of building the wrong product; thereby saving time, money, and other precious resources and the importance of usability testing can be grouped into:
How to Conduct a Usability Test
Sophia Brooke suggests 6 steps to conduct the usability test, which are:
In order to build the prototype, there are dozen of tools available in the market. Prototype development is the first part of the process and the purpose is to test the concept and build upon the initial framework for further testing. After that, you need to draft the test plan, which will guide you to go through the whole procedure and especially, with the documentation referred to once there is the case out of expectation. Here are the key points you should include in your test plan.
After you have your test plan in hand, you could start to recruit your participation and recruit your participants. According to Jared M. Spool, when planning whom to recruit, the best technique with the question in mind that “What attributes will cause one user to behave differently than another?” Fiding the right participate will ensure the quality of the test’s results.
To understand the forms of the tests and how to prepare the test scrips, here is the mind map you could refer to. Basically, tests could be divided into moderate tests and unmoderated tests, and moderated tests are conducted in-person or remotely while unmoderated tests are conducted remotely. Moderated sessions allow for back and forth between the participant and facilitator, and unmoderated usability sessions are completed alone by the participant.
To create usability test tasks that will help you to get the most out of each test session. The tasks should be realistic, encourage an action, and avoid giving away any indicator.
It may happen that after the feedbacks and find outs in the testing, the design rush into the redesign and enhance the performance, but the synthesizing, summarizing, and organizing usability testing results are equally as the testing itself. It may be a time-consuming process but it deserved the time and efforts, as you need to double check for errors that could potentially make the data unreliable and documentation the data for further usage.
Finally, is to make best use of the test findings to fix the errors and enhance the user experiences. To generate multiple solutions for each of the issues prioritize the solutions that will work best to address the needs.
Again, if you want to have a comprehensive view and understanding of the usability testing, click this mind map that I built! Thank you for reading!
References:
How to Conduct a Usability Test in Six Steps from Start to Finish
Turn User Goals into Task Scenarios for Usability Testing
Seven Common Usability Testing Mistakes