Usability testing evaluates how easily a design can be used by a sample group of users representing the target audience. This process typically involves observing users as they attempt to complete tasks and can be applied to different types of designs. Usability testing is often conducted at various stages of development, ranging from the early stages of development until the release of a product.
In my previous role as a Technical Product Owner, I worked closely with my UX team to understand the process of creating initial mock-ups after finalizing the requirements to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). As a Technical Product Owner, I was responsible for connecting my UX design, Development, and DB teams from scratch, design to product release. This included overseeing the creation of mock-ups, building prototypes, and testing different scenarios including usability testing methods.
What is Usability Testing?
In user experience (UX), usability testing is a vital process that involves evaluating how easily a design can be used by a group of users who represent the target audience. This process usually involves observing users as they try to complete tasks and can be applied to different types of designs. Usability testing is conducted at various stages of development, starting from the early stages until the release of the final product. The primary goal of usability testing is to create a positive user experience by solving their problems and helping them achieve their objectives. If you're interested in mastering these skills, consider enrolling in a UI/UX Design course for comprehensive training and practical experience.
Purpose of Usability Testing
The purpose of usability testing are:
- Identify the problems in the product or service design
- Discovering opportunities to enhance
- Understanding about the target user’s preferences and behavior
- Conduct an online survey to collect the feedback and improvement areas
Why is Usability Testing Necessary?
Usability testing is necessary for the following reasons:
- ·Usability testing method defines a clear objective and concise goals.
- It creates insights into user interaction to perform realistic tasks for representatives and provides a natural environment for testing.
- Usability testing is essential for users to perform the testing with minimal stress and bugs.
- Users can easily test the results and identify areas for improvement.
Different Types of Usability Testing Methods Techniques
Below are various types of usability testing methods that allow users to test the product with a unique experience.
1. Qualitative vs quantitative
- Qualitative Method: In Qualitative method, the goal of usability testing is to understand the emotions, thoughts, and experiences of the users. It understands users' minds, connects their thought process, and reads their mind to check what's going on.
- Quantitative Method: Quantitative methods in usability testing aim to gather numerical data to assess the usability of a product or system. These methods provide insights into user behavior, preferences, and performance metrics like error rate, task completion time, task success rate etc.
2. Exploitative vs comparative
- Explorative usability: This testing lets participants discover their views, thoughts and ideas to share with the audience. It defines the streamline process to start a product development as initial phase with a smaller number of participants group and solve a problem within the group.
- Comparative usability: This testing provides the ability to gather the output based on the comparative versions of a feature of a product and this process helps to generate a better decision as per the user preferences. It is commonly performed with more participants. Comparative usability testing is a valuable tool for businesses and organizations that seek to optimize their digital products and enhance the user experience. By identifying the strengths and weaknesses of different designs, they can create more user-friendly and efficient products that meet the needs and expectations of their target.
3. Moderated vs Unmoderated
- Moderator testing: It involves aligning participants with a coordinator, either in-person or remotely, to assist them in their progress and support them if they encounter any difficulties.
- Unmoderated testing: In this testing participants are not guided by the facilitator. They perform their testing on their own and from a place and time where they choose. Online usability testing tools are utilized to conduct unmoderated usability tests.
4. Remote vs in-person
- Remote usability testing: In this testing, participants can choose the location as per their convenience. Remote testing has become more common thanks to the advancement of technology and online tools. An online usability testing platform is mainly used to conduct the sessions, with the capability of recording it at the same time they can finish the testing and collect the data and share the action plan.
- In-person usability testing: This testing involves individuals in a professional setting who may engage in real-time communication with a researcher or subject matter expert to discuss specific queries. It focuses on the quality and efficiency of communication during these interactions and their impact on productivity and overall performance.
5. Website vs mobile
- Website: In websites usability testing method, users are asked to test the product or features on the web interface and provide feedback on how the UI behaves and its screen layout. By doing so, it helps to identify any challenges in the user experience (UX) and areas that need improvement.
- Mobile: Mobile usability testing is a specific form of usability testing that focuses on evaluating the usability and user experience of mobile applications (apps) or mobile-responsive websites. Usability testing is performed on a mobile device. This Testing is vastly efficient and easy to set up, and it helps identify any usability issues in real-time.
10 Popular Usability Testing Methods
Usability testing defines how we can utilize the product in accordance with the user's expectations. It provides feature sets on how to validate designs and generate improvement ideas by observing real users interacting with the product. Here we have the below popular testing methods techniques.
1. Unmoderated Usability Testing
- Description: Unmoderated usability testing does not have direct communication between participants and reviewers. It is faster than a moderated study and allows for gathering feedback from numerous users at the same time in different time zones.
- Use for: Consider using an unmoderated test if you need to gather responses from multiple testers in a shorter amount of time. This can provide you with a larger amount of data on your target audience's behavior patterns, which can help you make more informed decisions for your business. However, as unmoderated tests are remote, it is important to ensure that all participants are properly instructed and monitored to ensure accurate results.
- Average time: 20 mins
- Average number of participants: 5 to 10 participants
- Average cost: about $200-$300 for mid-size application
2. Moderated testing
- Description: Moderated testing is a widely recognized method of usability testing. This method involves a moderator who guides the participants through the testing process while collecting valuable feedback on the product being tested. The process is designed to identify usability issues and improve the overall user experience of a product. With its emphasis on user feedback, moderated testing enables product designers and developers to create more effective and user-friendly products. It is a well-established and proven technique widely used in academic and business settings.
- Use for: Moderated testing is a highly effective technique that can provide significant benefits during the early stages of product development or prototyping. This is especially useful when you are still in the process of creating your product, but you want to gauge the reactions of potential users to your ideas. By conducting moderate tests, you can obtain valuable feedback that can help you refine your product and ensure that it meets the needs of your target audience. Moderated testing allows you to observe users as they interact with your product, giving you insights into how they use it and what they find confusing or difficult. This feedback can be used to identify issues or areas for improvement before you spend more resources on development. Moreover, moderated testing can help you identify what features are most important to users, what they like and dislike about the product, and what changes they would like to see. This usability testing methodology provides a reliable and in-depth insight into the minds of the target audience, thereby extracting highly relevant information about their expectations. Moreover, the entire team can witness a live session and promptly provide feedback on the results, which allows for real-time adjustments and more precise outcomes. This approach instills confidence in the team, as they can be sure that their testing process is efficient and effective.
- Average time 1 to 2 hours
- Average number of participants: 3 to 5 participants
- Average cost: $499 ($99 per participant, 5 participants minimum)
3. Guerilla testing
- Description: Guerrilla testing is a form of UX usability testing that involves selecting participants at random from a public place, such as a coffee shop or mall. The test participants are then asked to complete a quick usability test in exchange for a small incentive. This method provides a rapid and effective approach to gathering large amounts of qualitative results. Guerrilla testing is a low-cost method that allows usability professionals to test their designs in real-world settings with real users. This approach is particularly useful when a large and diverse sample of participants is required, or when time is limited. In these cases, the random selection of participants provides a representative sample of users that can be tested quickly and efficiently.
- Use for: Guerrilla testing is a way to do research quickly and inexpensively. Your design team can use it without having to recruit participants or pay for research costs. This method is especially useful to test your product right away. It's more cost-effective than moderated or unmoderated testing.
- Average time: 10 to 15 mins
- Average number of participants: 6 to 12 group
- Average cost: $60-$100 per agent.
4. Lab usability testing
- Description: Laboratory usability testing is a well-established method employed to identify design issues and facilitate product designers in determining areas that require user interface redesigning. In this method, a moderator observes participants and asks questions while stakeholders and team members take copious notes from behind a one-way mirror. All participants complete the test under the same standardized conditions, ensuring that the results can be compared with ease.
- Use for: It is useful in gathering quantitative data, identifying errors, and tracing the product's performance in a test environment.
- Average time:20 to 30 minutes
- Average number of participants: 8 to 12 group
- Average cost: $550-$1000 based on project size and participants
5. Card testing
- Description: Card sorting is a user-centered design technique that applies organizing a website's content into categories or groups to obtain user feedback by its layout and navigational structure. By allowing users to categorize and organize content according to their own preferences, designers and product managers can gain insights into how people naturally organize information.
- Use for: It can be helpful to create a more intuitive and user-friendly web experience by making the site easier to navigate. In addition, card sorting can help recognize areas of improvement in the site's design, allowing designers to make adjustments that improve the overall user experience.
- Average time: If there are 30 cards, it will be 20 minutes and 50 cards then it will be 30 minutes.
- Average number of participants:15 group
- Average cost: $30-$60 per participant based in project size
6. Tree testing
- Description: Tree testing defines the process for completing tasks in the tree-view menu structure.
- Use for: Tree testing is a type of website usability testing, and it follows the process of a card sorting test. It is mainly used in a realistic navigational structure that creates a page layout and helps to get the result as per the customer's preferences. It involves conducting shorter sessions of about 15-20 minutes. Users can test the website structure in more efficient ways through this process.
- Average time:15 to 20 minutes
- Average number of participants: 50 participants
- Average cost: $100 per user per month basis
7. a/b testing
- Description: This UX usability testing method helps to compare two versions of an application or website detect the result of the accuracy of their performance and provides insights into statistical analysis
- Use for: A/B testing helps to get a better ROI (return on investment) from your existing traffic reduces the bounce rate as well as creates small transformations on your website such as modifying your call-to-action buttons. It helps to identify the impact of comparing versions and identify which version performs better. It can also collect important business metrics and goals.
- Average time: Test for 7 days, repeat for another 7 if needed.
- Average number of participants: More people tested = more accurate results. Small samples = less reliable data.
- Average cost: $50 per participant
8. 5-second test
- Description: The look and feel of UI design interfaces can be detected through five-second testing, which is a user research technique.
- Use for: It helps to collect customers' inputs in each time frame of 5 seconds to receive their first-impression feedback on a specific landing page of the UI. This testing has the right way to reach out to customers and conduct one-on-one sessions to receive their feedback.
- Average time: 5 seconds
- Average number of participants: 20 to 50 participants
- Average cost: $2/participant hired. $3/person for targeting.
9. Eye tracking
- Description: Eye tracking testing is used to determine whether the eye's focus or eye movement is being evaluated while viewing a web page.
- Use for: It is used mainly to watch webpage with the help of the eye tracking device we can collect the data on a certain action where the participant's eye is and find out the direction and focus of their gaze.
- Average time: 20 minutes
- Average number of participants: 10-40 participants
- Average cost: $59 per month basis per user
10. Screen recording
- Description: The main purpose of remote usability testing is to record sessions with multiple participants using ZOOM or Microsoft Teams software. The recorded sessions can be analysed by users and understood, and it aids new participants in understanding them.
- Use for: With the help of a screen recorder participants can finish tasks remotely, and it helps them to gather feedback and get an understanding of certain points if they are missed and capture the clicks or any cursor movements and record them.
- Average time: 15 minutes
- Average number of participants: 5 to 10 group of participants
- Average cost: per months for 10 user $100
11. Usability Tests in the Laboratory
- Definition: Usability testing refers to assessing a product or service by testing it with anticipated users. It is mainly used during a test when participants perform a specific task and observers monitor, listen, and take notes.
- Use for: It is useful in gathering quantitative data, identifying errors, and tracing the product's performance in a test environment.
- Average time:20 to 30 minutes
- Average number of participants: 8 to 12 group
- Average cost: $550-$1000 based on project size and participants
12. Contextual Inquiry
- Definition Context inquiry is based on the research method and observing users in their natural work environment and conducting Q&A sessions with them.
- Use for: CI is primarily utilized in software development, user experience design, and service delivery. It provides valuable insights into customers' day-to-day operations and allows them to analyze how their product is perceived. It's beneficial to comprehend the user's behavior closely or if they encounter any obstacles. IT works closely with both participants and researchers.
- Average time: 2 Hours
- Average number of participants: Based on the task and project, for small tasks, 4 to 12 participants are sufficient. For medium-scale projects, 12 to 24, and for large-scale projects, 25 to 30 participants are necessary.
- Average cost: $100 per hour
Enroll in a reputable Web Development training institute to learn about popular defined different usability testing methods with usability testing techniques.
Conclusion
This article provides readers with an in-depth understanding of over 10 popular usability testing methods that will be used in 2024. I have shared my experiences and research on these methods to help readers comprehend the intricate concepts, along with their benefits and the latest innovations in usability testing techniques. KnowledgeHut's course UI/UX Design is a valuable resource for professionals in diverse fields, including testers, developers, UX designers, product designers, and those interested in pursuing a career in Testing Automation and User Experience Design.
It is notable that usability testing is widely implemented by top industries worldwide, given its ease of use and ability to provide optimal user and customer experiences. By employing various techniques of usability testing, products can achieve enhanced robustness and full responsiveness. This article is an invaluable resource for professionals in diverse fields, including testers, developers, UX designers, product designers, and those interested in pursuing a career in Testing Automation and User Experience Design.
