Usability refers to the ease in using a product, interface or item. There are five components that qualitatively contribute to usability – the ease of the first interaction with the product, the efficiency of the interaction, how memorable the interaction was, how often errors occur in the interaction, and how pleasant the experience was.
Good usability ensures success and survival. For instance, how often have we abandoned using an online service because the webpage wouldn’t load properly, or we kept getting an error message? Wouldn’t it be brilliant to ensure customers/clients loved your product because they found it easy to use and memorable from the first try, exploring different aspects of the product was seamless and errorless, and they felt a great sense of satisfaction with the overall experience? Here, Usability Testing takes the stage –
What is usability testing?
Usability testing involves choosing a small representative sample of users to observe their interaction with the product or service to note where they succeed and where they fail in typical tasks. This information (in the form of qualitative and quantitative data) is critical in informing decisions to improve the product, ultimately improving user satisfaction.
Why do usability testing?
Key factors of the user experience can be identified: Quantitative measures such as number of errors, amount of time spent in each task, and user satisfaction ratings, along with qualitative measures such as user’s through process or strategy in completing tasks provide data that can be analysed to assess whether usability objectives are met. That is, is the user successfully able to use the product or service in the way it was intended, to full potential?
It is cost and time effective: Identifying usability issues earlier will allow proper design implementation to avoid future product recalls due to user dissatisfaction or errors, and accordingly, save time spent on recalling, redesigning and relaunching in the future.
When do you do it?
Usability testing can and should be done in early stages of prototyping a new product or service to make sure it works well when it launches and that users find it intuitive. However, it can be done on current products or services in order to make improvements to suit users’ needs.
Summary
Usability testing ensures good ROI, saving time and money in the long run. Mainly, it allows for user-input-directed improvements in design to increase usability and leave users happily coming back for more.
