Test smart: how to refine your design with usability testing
Have you ever experienced a feeling of disappointment about some purchase? Was it a birdhouse that birds were not interested in? Or a coffee grinder that did not grind coffee well?
Similarly, a feeling of disappointment (or even frustration) is the thing experienced by an end-user of a poorly developed digital product. When trying any app out, people expect that they can solve their problems or manage tasks seamlessly.
And if not, the deal-breaker is usability.
Usability vs UX
Once I was lucky to attend an exciting talk about UX given by Isabel Evans at Test Academy in Valencia. She introduced usability as one of the concepts described in ISO’s Product Quality Standards. ISO definition says that usability is the degree to which a product or system can be used by users to achieve their goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.
In simple words, usability exists in three dimensions: effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. Effectiveness means the user gets their task completed without external help. Efficiency reflects the time a user spends on a task and the number of errors that occur on their way. Satisfaction is seen through real-time user reactions to a product or any kind of received feedback.
To go further, usability is a subset of user experience. Whenever you are working on high-quality UX, the product must satisfy usability criteria.
People judge by the first impression
Recently, I tested five tools for screen recording. All of them were free, few of them offered an advanced version for a fee. Four of five tools were unusable because of a badly working interface or funny bugs like blurring video as an output.
As a result of a few hours of exploration, I picked up a tool that was working.
Naturally, humans tend to make decisions based on their experiences and feelings. And normally, people do not wish to deal with any kind of frustration again. It’s more than obvious that an end-user who tried a free version of some unusable product would not even dare to try its paid option. Where the users have a choice and meet an unlucky experience, you’ll very likely lose a customer.
Average users are not geeks
Let’s admit: people who work in the IT industry live in a bubble. We are quite distant from the world of end-users and their real-life requests. We may also think that users can learn to perform any task as easily as we do it. And this assumption is not necessarily true.
Anybody involved in development is a super-geek compared with the average population. Even the less-technical team members like designers or QA specialists are only “less-technical” than developers. They still have much stronger technical skills than the majority of people. Consequently, what is easy for your 25-year-old designer might be confusing for a 50-year-old corporate manager who performs daily tasks using your software.
Only with a realistic understanding of the needs of end-users, we can build digital products that will be recognized as appropriate. Here, demographics — cultural background, gender, age, and personality — all is relevant to learn more about people who use your product and their down-to-earth expectations.
As Koray Yitmen states in his book Business Analysis, Software Testing, Usability:
“The better user’s needs are understood, the more usable the software will be.”
He adds that users should be consulted at every stage of the usability process. Yet do we involve them enough?
The golden rule
The golden rule of usability is to keep the design of the product as simple as possible. Ideally, the user should be able to understand and use an application without a training course or a 100-page-long tutorial. The more simple and intuitive UX is, the less confusion and user errors will occur.
Besides designing a nice-looking UI, it’s vital to keep in mind that an app might be used by people with disabilities like hearing problems, colour blindness, etc. This way, the product should be adjusted to multiple groups of users so that it is accessible to all.
How to test usability?
Typically, usability tests are applied to refine the design and features of the product. As soon as your prototypes are ready or a draft version is coded, it’s time to check usability.
Any team member can try to evaluate usability by exploring the product with various user personas that match your context. According to Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin, a persona is an imaginary user the team creates with characteristics such as age, educational background, experience, personality quirks, profession, etc. Some teams have a defined set of personas representing their target customer base that they apply as they develop new features.
To prepare for the usability evaluation session, focus on personas that potentially represent your end-users and create a checklist for the main use cases (tasks) you’d like to go through. Then try to explore use cases from each persona’s perspective and make notes of your observations. In the session, check how easy the system is to learn and use, explore possible user errors or confusing behaviours, and verify UI aesthetics and accessibility.
To my mind, the most valuable are usability tests that are run through conversations (interviews) with end-users. If you already have an MVP, just ask one of your friends if they have a few minutes to help you out by saying something like this:
“This is a draft version of >…< we’re working on. Would you mind taking a quick look at it and just speak out while you’re looking through and tell me everything that comes to your mind?”
As you show a draft to a friend, observe their interaction with a product, record it (if possible), and note any visible confusing behaviours or interesting comments on the fly. As Markus Pirker notes in his book How User Testing Actually Works In Practice, it is worth listening to any kind of feedback. Don’t get upset if it is a negative one. At the end of this session, you’ll get a clear picture of what can be improved.
You can apply the same approach showing a draft of a new feature to your end-user. This way, you will collect the customer’s reactions to the product’s feature in action. After all, people’s suggestions will help you to build a robust solution in line with their essential needs.
Whenever we develop a digital product, it’s necessary to keep in mind that people will use it. If the product does not reach its primary goals and people’s expectations, it is easily skipped and will never be used again. That’s why it is smart to evaluate usability as early as possible. With simple testing of prototypes, MVP or new features, you can learn more about your user’s wishes and develop brilliant solutions.
