The Designer’s Guide to Usability Testing

After many weeks and months spent building your digital product, the last thing you want is to have users churn long before you’ve recovered your acquisition costs. It’ll matter little that you’ve downloaded the best screens and user flows from UILand if they find your product to be buggy, confusing, or hard to navigate. You can relax, though. Usability testing is an effective way to eliminate multiple points of friction before you launch your product or a new feature in it. Roll up your sleeves as we this important tool in the designer’s arsenal.

What is Usability Testing?

Usability testing is a user-centered design technique you can use to evaluate real user interaction with your product.

The main goal of usability testing is to determine if your product design is efficient, effective, and satisfying. We may call this the triad of user satisfaction. Here’s a table to summarize this.

The Importance of Usability Testing

When you build a full software product or one of its features without observing others try it, it leads to creator blindness. This is the reason why you can’t skip usability testing.

Did you know that even product teams resolve disputes using usability testing? That’s because the simplest usability evaluation doesn’t care whose ox is good; real users make it clear what they want from your product!

Now, let’s consider the cost of not doing usability testing. PriceWaterhouseCoopers reports that just one bad digital experience can lead to the permanent loss of more than 30 percent of users. Therefore, you need usability testing to reliably ensure that you’re building a product that is bot functional and usable.

Usability Testing Methods

There are different ways to perform usability testing. Your approach to it depends on your resources, product development stage, and the specific insight you’re interested in.

Here’s a short summary of the major usability testing methods.

Moderated usability testing

Unmoderated usability testing

Guerilla or hallway testing

Remote usability testing vs. in-person testing

Prototype testing

Qualitative vs. quantitative testing

5 Steps to Conduct Usability Testing

It’s important that you conduct your usability testing in a structured and repeatable way. Here are five steps you can use as a UX designer:

Define your objectives and metrics.

Select the right participants.

Create realistic test scenarios.

Perform tests and observe.

Analyze results, prioritize data, and iterate.

Usability testing can help you avoid unpleasant user surprises after launching your product. You can check out proven screen and user flow inspirations from top companies on UILand. This can help you cut down on product development time by knowing in advance what users want.