Why, How & What is Usability Testing?
Usability Testing is a Black Box Testing Technique. Usability testing is done with users’ points of view. It is a technique implemented in user-centered interaction design to evaluate a product or service by testing it with representative users. On the Web page, usability is the most important and required condition for survival.
People will not stay on the page if the website is difficult to use. People will leave the page if the content or details are hard to read or understand. So, Usability testing is important in assessing how easy user interfaces are to use.
Usability Testing Definition
The testing aim is to recognize usability problems, gather qualitative and quantitative data, and establish the participant’s fulfillment of the user’s product.
Usability testing is an essential element of quality assurance. It measures a product’s potential to accomplish the user’s goals. Usability testing is a method by which product users are asked to perform certain tasks to measure the product’s ease of use, task time, and the user’s perception of the experience. This looks like a unique usability practice because it provides direct input on how real users use the system.
- Usability testing measures human-usable products to fulfill the user’s purpose. The items that benefit from usability testing are websites or web applications, documents, computer interfaces, consumer products, and devices. Usability testing processes the usability of a particular object or group of objects, where common human-computer interaction studies try to formulate universal principles.
- Usability features like “Look and feel” cannot always be measured because they are subjective. In usability testing, most testers test the ease of the use of the user interface. The tester can test user-friendly or non-friendly applications or products, too. Usability testing is a true test of how people use a website & determines whether a user feels comfortable with other applications or Websites according to different parameters like the flow, browsing, layout, speed, and content.
Usability Testing Checklist
The usability testing checklist is divided into Accessibility, Navigation, and Content.
Section I: Accessibility
- Check if the load time of the website is realistic.
- Check if Adequate Text-to-Background Contrast is present.
- Check if font size & spacing between the texts are properly readable.
- Check if a website has 404 pages or any custom-designed Not Found page.
- Check if appropriate ALT tags are added for images.
Section II: Navigation
- Check if a user effortlessly recognizes the website navigation.
- Check if navigation options are understandable & short.
- Check if the number of buttons/links is reasonable.
- Check if the Company Logo Is Linked to Home-page
- Check if the style of links is consistent on all pages & easy to understand.
- Check if site search is present on-page & should be easy to access.
Section III: Content
- Check if URLs Are Meaningful & User-friendly
- Check if HTML Page Titles Are Explanatory
- Check if Critical Content Is Above The Fold
- Check if Emphasis (bold, etc.) Is Used Sparingly
- Check if Main Copy Is Concise & Explanatory
- Check if Major Headings Are Clear and Descriptive.
- Check if Styles & Colors Are Consistent
Key Benefits of Usability Testing
- Decrease development and redesign costs, which increases user satisfaction.
- Help to determine the real requirements and tasks of the user before time in the design process.
- Analysis of your website design’s strengths and weaknesses.
- Limit graphics with functions of design.
- User productivity increases, and cost decreases.
- Increase business due to satisfied customers.
- Reduces user acclimation time and errors.
- Provide better quality software to the end-user or the customer.
- The software will be easy to understand and use by the end-user or the customer.
- Users gladly accept the software.
- Shorten the learning curve for new users.
Advantages of Usability Testing
- Usability testing finds important bugs and potholes in the tested application, which will not be visible to the developer.
- Using correct resources, usability tests can assist in fixing all problems that users face before application releases.
- A usability test can be modified according to the requirement to support other types of testing, such as functional testing, system integration testing, Unit testing, smoke testing, etc.
- Planned Usability testing becomes very economical, highly successful, and beneficial.
- Issues and potential problems are highlighted before the product is launched.
Limitations of usability testing
Planning and data-collecting processes are time-consuming. It is always confusing why usability problems come. Its small and simple size makes it unreliable for concluding subjective user preferences.
It’s hard to create a suitable context. You can’t test long-term experiences. Unplanned social connections cannot be replicated. People act in a different way when they know they’re being observed.
