“When UX doesn’t consider ALL users, shouldn’t it be known as “SOME User Experience” or… SUX?”
The above quote is by Billy Gregory, Senior Accessibility Engineer at the Paciello Group, who reminds us that the UX of a digital product is supposed to cater to the users. Isn’t it common sense to ask the users if they like the design or not?
Usability testing is a process that helps entrepreneurs and designers validate their designs with real-life users. It is the only way to gauge the users’ interests and ask them if your design makes sense.
We at Yellow Slice have been following a four-stage process for nearly two decades, which we call STEP (Soak, Think, Execute, and Proof). The four stages are further divided into a seven-step process that we swear by, as it has delivered fantastic results in the past with brands that can vouch for us.
Abu Hurera Nagori is a senior UX designer at Yellow Slice, and his opinions about usability tests are short, crisp and to the point when he said:
“No more beating around the bush; run those usability tests if you wish to enhance the user experience of your product.”
Why is Usability Testing So Important?
Among other possibilities, not running usability tests can be one of the reasons why your customers are running away from UX. There are many direct benefits of conducting usability tests; here, we briefly explain some of them.
- Assessment
UX testing methods are such a boon for entrepreneurs; they can assess beforehand whether or not the design positively impacts users. You can assess your project against the users’ pain points, expectations and needs so that you can iterate your design based on these factors.
Conducting usability tests can collect data on user experiences and measure how well the user experience meets the usability criteria.
- Exploration
UX usability testing methods help uncover hidden truths that can take your design to the next level, including qualitative data, metrics and user behaviour patterns. Exploring a new set of observations leaves you with an open mind that reflects real-world scenarios.
These new insights help designers develop potential design solutions to generate solutions during the early design stages. Such solutions aren’t only creative but bring new ideas to the shore.
- Comparison
You can validate your design by comparing it to other versions of the design through usability testing methods in UX to see which one is performing better.
What happens when we think that something is the best often doesn’t land well with the audience, and the audience likes something that we, as designers or entrepreneurs, initially opposed. This improves user experience as the users choose the design that makes it easier to find their goals.
- User loyalty
When users notice a brand improvising their design based on feedback, they form a sense of loyalty and connection towards the brand. This connection goes beyond metrics and will help a business with word-of-mouth marketing.
Users feel valued when they see their demands coming to action, and in today’s internet world, where brands don’t care about users, you can stand out by catering to them.
6 Essential Usability Testing Techniques to Unlock Powerful UX Insights
If you are as intrigued by your users’ feedback as you should be, there are many ways to get that information. Here, we mention six of those,
1. A/B Testing
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a process that helps solve the confusion designers might have between two versions of the same product.
For fun examples, do you remember the show Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) used to have a lifeline called 50:50? The computer used to remove two wrong answers from the question, leaving the contestant with a 50% chance of selecting the correct answer.
This way, contestants only had to choose between those two options, and it used to clear the ambiguity in their heads.
Similarly, when designing a product, designers are usually confused about which features, fonts, and colour palettes to use.
With A/B testing, they can create and test two product versions during the usability testing procedure to see which performs better and iterate the design accordingly.
Why A/B testing?
This approach helps with deciding factors like content placement, information architecture, CTA specifics, etc., to determine which is more user-friendly. It also answers specific questions in particular scenarios.
How to do it?
Ask the users to perform certain tasks across groups. Then, notice key usability metrics like time spent on a certain task, success rate of that task, heatmaps, click-through rate, conversion rates, qualitative data such as user feedback and opinion, etc.
The metrics will reflect user behaviour and answer almost all questions arising during the designing process.
Tool you can use to perform A/B testing:
FullStory is a tool that helps you generate heatmaps and provides detailed analytics to help you understand where user engagement increased and decreased.
Amongst many other services, this tool helps you record and replay user sessions, giving detailed reports on how users navigate the website and app.
1. Heuristic Evaluation
Experts evaluating your design are like having a guiding light above your shoulder. Heuristic Evaluation requires a group of evaluators who will review the design and check its usability based on a set of principles, famously called heuristics. This evaluation aims to uncover possible problems affecting the user experience.
Why Heuristic Evaluation?
This evaluation method provides a set of standards by which you can measure the success of your design so that the definition of success is no longer ambiguous.
How to do It:
Before beginning with this process, you must select a set of heuristics that will serve as the north star of your design, guiding you every step of the way. We suggest using Nielson Norman’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design and User Focus’s Web Usability Guidelines.
Usually, a usability expert or a group evaluate diverse perspectives. They are well-versed in the principles and point out any violations in those principles that do not align with the pre-defined principles.
Tool you can use to perform Heuristic Evaluation:
User testing is a tool that the evaluators can use to streamline the whole usability testing process. Trusted by leading brands such as Trustpilot and Trust Radius User Testing, it has solutions for all teams.
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Remote User Testing
Some businesses don’t have the resources to conduct usability testing with real users. Hence, they use remote testing methods, meaning the users don’t need to be physically close to the team. There are many types of remote user testing methods UX, and the two most common are phone or video interviews and session recordings.
Why Remote User Testing?
The moderator can ask users worldwide to participate in the process for a broader opinion base. Remote methods are economical and save a lot of time.
How to Do It:
The process starts with the moderator setting clear instructions and goals for participants. Cultural or linguistic differences among the participants might be something that the moderator should tackle.
The participants are asked to perform a certain task and give verbal feedback on their experience.
For session recording, software records the actual actions of participants to see how users interact with your website or app. The actions include mouse movement, clicks, and scrolling; these actions help designers to understand where the users stumble or leave the page.
Tool you can use to perform Remote User Testing:
Maze is a powerful tool that helps you run tests on live websites and lets customers voice fuel product decisions.
1. Eye-Tracking Studies
As the name suggests, in this testing method, the user’s eye movements are observed using tools like heatmaps, pathway diagrams and specialised cameras that notice a user’s gaze at all moments when interacting with the design.
Why Eye-Tracking Studies?
Like Al Pacino once said, “The eye chico, they never lie”. The user’s eye movements on any given page reveal the attention hotspots and user navigation patterns. These help make better design decisions and design according to the user’s gaze.
How to Do It:
Designers should compare engagement across different devices to observe the user’s entry and exit from a page. Analysing heatmaps can be easily done with the software to make a note of metrics like click tracking on key areas such as CTAs and navigation.
Tool you can use to perform Eye Tracking Studies:
UXCam is a tool that shows mobile app analytics highlighting your app’s most and least attention-grabbing elements.
1. Tree Testing
Tree testing, also known as reverse card sorting, is a usability testing method that evaluates the functionality of a website’s information architecture and navigation structure. The tree denotes a digital product’s sitemap with categories, sub-categories and other items.
Why Tree Testing?
Informational architecture is one of the most important elements of the whole UX design. If the sitemap is intuitive for users, it will take them a very short time to complete a task. Tree testing helps design an efficient website architecture through usability testing.
How to do it?
In tree testing, participants are presented with a visual representation of the website’s hierarchy (sitemap) and asked to locate items within that structure. The results will show how efficiently users can navigate the information hierarchy to find the desired content.
Tools you can use to perform Tree Testing:
UXTweak is an online free tree testing tool that helps make the navigation intuitive.
1. Card Sorting
The process involves categorising information into cards, and the results help make design decisions related to menu structures, content hierarchy and navigation.
Why Card Sorting?
Information is better analysed when organised into categories, and that’s what the card sorting method does. Different cards are sorted, and the content related to the infrastructure architecture of the digital product is organised into predefined categories.
How to do Card Sorting?
Card sorting can be conducted remotely and in person. Moderators decide the sections that the cards will be divided into beforehand. The content will be displayed on the cards, and participants will be asked to divide these cards into categories.
Once the cards are sorted, grouping patterns will be analysed to identify commonalities and differences. Participants can be asked why they organised the group the way they did and the thought process they followed.
Tools you can use to perform Card Sorting:
Figma has a card-sorting tool that helps you learn how your users categorise information.
Case Studies and Success Stories
Don’t believe us? Here are true case stories of businesses conducting usability tests and reaping the benefits.
1. The Shopify Experts Marketplace
The Shopify Experts Marketplace is a platform that works as a bridge in connecting Shopify merchants who need Shopify experts who excel in the services they offer and help merchants grow their businesses.
Executives wanted to test a feature on the platform. When Shopify merchants need a service provider, they go to the Expert profile to find detailed information about the expert, like services provided, client testimonials, projects completed, etc. However, some merchants found the profile page hard to navigate.
Hence, the Shopify team wanted to ensure that they were writing a gist of relevant information about the experts through generative user interviews to make it easy for merchants to know the details.
The usability tests were conducted to understand what the users wanted to know about the experts, and the team concluded that merchants like profiles that feel more human and less transactional. They want to understand how the expert is a freelancer and how he/she communicates. After this discovery, it became easy for merchants to hire experts.
1. ElectricFeel
ElectricFeel is a platform for entrepreneurs and public transport companies to launch their businesses and scale them to gain large fleets of shared electric bicycles and mopeds. The platform has a mobile app where riders can rent their vehicles, providing a system for automobile companies to function.
New riders joining the app found it difficult to go through the registration system, so the ElectricFeel team wanted to make this process easier through usability testing.
The team compared the results of user persona workshops with real customer experience to sketch out new insights that helped in sketching new wireframes for the new rider activation user interface.
The user appreciated the results of the usability testing process; the new interface was later implemented in the final design, which helped new riders immensely and increased the number of registrations of new riders.
1. Trint
Trint is a software that helps in transcription and content creation with its speech-to-text feature using AI algorithms. Earlier, the team used MIxpanel, a tool that uses quantitative data to gauge the website’s performance, but nothing fruitful came their way.
However, the conversion rate of this B2B website did not increase over time, and the team resorted to usability testing to find out where the problem lay in the marketing funnel. Understanding how smooth the customer journey is through user interviews was made possible through remote interview options like Zoom.
The team asked the participants to share their screens, and the sessions were recorded for analysis. Observers could use Trint’s real-time transcription feature to leave comments.
After analysing those recordings, designers understood the most painful points of a customer’s journey, which were tackled through ideation and iterative prototyping. New customers enjoyed the removal of onboarding surveys and fresh content that was easy to comprehend.
How Yellow Slice Helped AlterEgo to Ace their UX Design
Alterego is a one-of-a-kind app that helps users remember people and key parts of their conversations with people. The app aims to offer data to users that will help them hold more efficient conversations with others.
The Problem: Executives of Alterego approached Yellow Slice designers to design a mobile app that efficiently allows users to manage their conversations with others and saves important data points to improve user communication.
The Solution: Yellow Slice designers followed a design process for the Alterego mobile app, including research, UX design, and UI design. After a rigorous competitive analysis, prototypes were created for user testing. A feature list, task flows, sitemap, and wireframes were designed based on the research results.
UI samples were created to ensure that the interface design aligns with the stakeholders’ vision, and based on the approved samples, icons, illustrations, and interface screens were crafted.
Experience Slice of Designing at Yellow Slice?
Having worked with big names like Make My Trip, NPCI, Axis Bank, and Croma (and the list is long), we have picked up the best UX design practices. We take pride in advancing the human experience and deriving results for business with intuitions and facts.
Ready to get a slice of digital experience? Visit our service page, and let’s start designing your success today.
FAQs
1.What is the rule of 5 usability testing?
The 5-user rule was first proposed by Jakob Nielsen, researcher and founder of NN Group, in his article ‘Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users’ (2000), arguing that five-user testers will uncover 85% of usability problems.
So, an ideal usability test, according to this rule, needs only five users per method.
1.What are the 5 E’s of usability?
The 5 E’s of usability include:
Efficient: How long does the user take to perform a task after getting familiar with the design?
Effective: How close is the design to the needs of the user?
Engaging: Are the users finding the design pleasant?
Error tolerant: How well does the design prevent errors and help users recover?
Easy to learn: Do the users find it easy to accomplish tasks in the design when they use it for the first time?
Designers that want their designs to excel at usability make use of these 5 E’s.
