Design Template by Anonymous

Information that can help with Usability testing

Best practices and common challenges with usability testing

As you can see from the provided stock image, you do not want this to happen with your projects. That is why you need to focus on having good practices with usability testing and with that there will be challenges along with this. Some of the best practices you can do to avoid frustration is to. Start early, doing this will incorporate testing throughout the design and project development process. You need to have clear objectives. If you have clearly outline and setup what you want to achieve with your testing. Recruit a diverse group of users. Doing this will help with having a range of users to gain information and data from. You dont want to just have a few software engineers testing a tetris game. Have realistic standards and scenarios, doing this will make it so the user doesn't feel out of place or confused. Encourage honest feedback. You want to have those negative reviews as they can make a positive impact just as a normal review would. Recording data. You need to have everything recorded something from a early development test could help in the long run for a final production push. Finally iterate and repeat. You want to continusley have tests and refine the product based on the user feedback. What this means is do not test in early stages then make a bunch of changes to test only at the end of production.

Common challenges

With these tests and practices, you are always going to run into challenges. What are they, you may ask? Well, for starters, you have a limited budget and resources. You cannot afford to pay 10-20 testers a week to test your latest feature; it wouldn't be budgeting right. Recruitment, trying to find the best candidates, may not always work out. For certain projects, you will struggle to find a target audience willing to help. Balance - every project needs balance. You need to create realistic test environments and maintain control over your variables and product. Interpreting feedback and overcoming bias is the hardest part of usability testing for a developer. You may think that your product's features and design are perfect, but in reality, everyone who uses the product hated it and disliked it. You have to take constructive criticism and put it to use.

A lot of people confuse user testing with usability testing. The main differnce as shown in the image is User testing is where you see WHO needs the app vs Usability testing is can users USE your app.

Where the future lies

With Usability testing already having a great system and history the only thing next is to make it automated. With the big rise in AI compamys are already rolling out AI Usability testing making it streamlined and easier to gain data from long complicated projetcs. Along with this there are a few webistes and softwares I will mention where you can use to conduct remote usability tests and make it eaiser then trying to email your users the tasks you want accomplished. Using these tools can step up your project with the ability to see all of the data on a table or a graph.

• Maze (Best for UX and continuous product discovery)
• Lookback (Best for screen recording and collaborative insights)
• UserTesting (Best for moderated user tests)
• Optimal workshop (Best for basic usability testing methods)
• UsabilityHub (Best for pay-per-answer remote research)