If you think that your product is intuitive, and it can’t get any better from here, then you’re just wrong. There’s always room for improvement. Elon Musk rightly said,
“Any product that needs a manual is broken.”
The quote can hurt you if you’ve spent months and years ideating and designing an app or website, and now users can’t navigate basic functions through the dashboard.
Most business owners and designers struggle to accept that what feels obvious to them can appear invisible or confusing to users. This is where usability testing comes in.
Akhil Nair, a UX researcher at Yellow Slice, excels at understanding user needs through his rigorous research. Here’s what he has to say,
“There’s a huge gap between what we believe users do and what they actually do. Usability testing bridges that gap with truth.”
It’s shocking that, even in this day, usability testing seems like a waste of budget to some. A study by Forrester found that every dollar invested in UX yields a return of $100.
At Yellow Slice, we 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.
Anthony Fernandes, who is the head of user experience at Yellow Slice, has a few nuggets of knowledge to share about usability testing.
“Usability testing isn’t just a box that you tick while designing a digital product, it’s a conversation with users about what they want. This conversation highlights every hesitation and every mis-click. As a designer, my job is to design with empathy and not with interfaces that are the flashiest.”
What Is Usability Testing?
Usability testing is a method designers use to evaluate the efficiency of a digital product’s user experience and navigation, whether it is a website or an app. A group of representative users who represent the target audience of your product is chosen, and they are tasked with performing several tasks on the platform to assess how easy the design is to use.
Before deploying the product in the marketplace, usability testing can help you with quantitative and qualitative data to measure users’ satisfaction with the product. Designers or researchers can use this data to analyse user behaviour and make software changes.
When real users navigate through the website or app, the functionality is tested. The testing can be done either in-person or remotely; The goal is to identify any areas of confusion or difficulty that might be creating the friction for users while completing tasks.
Usability Testing vs. The Rest: What Does What in the Testing Universe?
Usability testing is a qualitative research method that evaluates how easy and intuitive it is for users to interact with the product. It is conducted to identify usability problems, such as confusing navigation, unclear call-to-action (CTA) elements, and clunky workflows.
In Usability testing, users are given specific tasks, such as “make a purchase” or “add a product to the cart.” The researchers then see what struggles users are facing. Did they click on the wrong button? How much time do they take to complete the transaction?
It’s not just about whether the product works or not, but to see what the experience of people is as they interact with the product. What do they feel like?
This is about usability testing, but it’s essential to understand how usability testing differs from other types of testing, to understand what usability testing is not. There are several ways and methods to improve the user experience, but they don’t classify as usability testing; they include,
A/B Testing
What A/B testing does is it compares two (or more) versions of a web page or feature to see which ones perform better. When users utilise the platform and are primarily using one of the two versions, they will receive higher clicks and conversions.
Why A/B testing is different from usability testing?
A/B testing provides quantitative data on performance, but it doesn’t explain why one version performs better than another. It doesn’t observe user behaviour in real time to explain the reasoning behind why a particular version is better than the other.
According to Invesp, companies that use A/B testing see an average of 20–25% higher conversion rates; however, this doesn’t indicate whether users are taking a significant amount of time to complete an action. If it is time-consuming, then what steps can you take to reduce the time?
Focus Groups
Focus groups are groups of people whom the researcher gathers to discuss a specific topic. The aim is to learn their opinion about a product or service.
Why are focus groups different from usability testing?
Focus groups share their opinions, and opinions are not actual behaviour. Opinions are subjective knowledge; they can lack the objectivity of the truth. You’re not watching the people use the product; instead, they’re telling you about their experience after using it, and that can be full of bias. You are just hearing their thoughts about it, and thoughts are not always facts.
A focus group may indicate that they find something wrong with the checkout process, but usability testing can pinpoint which step exactly frustrates them.
Surveys
Surveys are used to collect self-reported feedback on user experience and satisfaction. The researchers prepare questions to ask from a set of questions tailored to the audience. Questions can be open-ended or closed-ended, and the surveys can be conducted online or offline.
Why are surveys different from usability testing?
Most surveys only have Yes/No questions, and those that include open-ended questions lack the capacity to delve deeply into user behaviour. Surveys rely on perception, not observation. They can tell you what users feel about a product in words, but they can’t show how they interact with the product in action.
Akhil has something controversial to say about surveys,
“The best feedback is often non-verbal—it’s in the pause before a click, the confused mouse movement, or the sigh when something’s unclear. You don’t get that from surveys or analytics.”
Heatmaps
Heatmaps provide a visual representation of how users interact with a page, highlighting the areas that are most and least engaging. They track clicks, scrolls, hovers, moves, and zone-based maps, allowing you to see how users, in aggregate, engage with a website.
Why are heatmaps different from usability testing?
Heatmaps reveal what users are doing, but they don’t reveal why they are doing it. For instance, a heatmap will show that users click a non-clickable icon, but only through usability testing is it revealed that the icon should be interactive.
Let’s hear if Akhil, as a UX research expert, vouches for heatmaps or not.
“Heatmaps are great, but they won’t tell you what caused hesitation. That’s why I always pair them with usability sessions.”
Why Usability Testing Matters?
Everybody is conducting usability testing, but why? Here are a few ways in which usability testing positively affects both design and business.
If you want to improve the UX of your digital products, then hear what Akhil has to say.
“You can’t improve what you don’t observe. Watching a user struggle for 30 seconds tells you more than a 30-page report.”
Catching Mistakes Before They Catch Your Budget
When you conduct usability testing, you catch problems early in the process, before they escalate into larger issues that would require significant costs. Fixing a problem in development costs in design is a lot cheaper than fixing it after release.
Usability issues often go unnoticed during the design and prototyping stages; they come to the surface after launch, and it’s too late to fix an already made design to rebuild it entirely. Build only what works from the beginning to avoid frustration with big feature changes later.
What You Think Users Do vs. What They Do
Designers are human beings as well, and human beings give in to their own biases; it may happen that they end up designing for themselves or based on what they think that users will want.
Usability testing offers a reality check and sheds light on actual user behaviour, challenging the assumptions you hold, which can be dramatically different from your own. For instance, you assume that a dropdown menu is the most intuitive way to present options, but usability testing reveals that users don’t care about it.
Delighted Designs = Retaining Users
Usability testing is about identifying flaws in a product and fixing them so that it becomes easier for users to navigate and understand. When users like the present product, they are more likely to stick to it and less likely to seek out alternatives.
The usability of a platform improves, new customers increase conversion rates, and the retention of existing customers also increases. A high retention rate directly means increased lifetime customer value and reduced churn.
Great UX Should Also Mean Great ROI
Sure, the user is at the centre of the design and business in general, but a company also needs to sustain itself. Products need to align with the business goals, whether it’s a vision or something as simple as achieving product-market fit, increasing Net Promoter Scores (NPS), expanding the user base, or enhancing brand reputation.
Don’t Just Design—Validate
Usability testing isn’t just meant for finished products, but you can also perform it on prototypes and wireframes. As we mentioned earlier, it’s more valuable when conducted early, before you’ve invested time and effort.
Suppose you want to incorporate a specific feature and are pretty confident about it. You design it in the product and test it with users and figure out if it makes sense to them. Probably, users will overlook it, and you will realise that you shouldn’t design it in the final product at all.
SoundCloud, for instance, engaged in continuous usability testing for its mobile app, uncovering over 150 usability issues, including 11 critical ones, across 144 devices and 22 countries. This iterative testing process ensured that updates were user-centric and functional.
Understanding the Why Behind Actions
Tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar can tell you “what” is happening on your website. However, it doesn’t shed any light on why users behave the way they do. Once you identify the root cause of their behaviour, it becomes relatively easy to design for them.
Usability testing involves both quantitative and qualitative aspects. For instance, in a tool, you found out that customers are dropping off on the signup page within the funnel. Usability testing has the potential to reveal the reasons behind this phenomenon. It may be because the content is phrased confusingly, or there are too many form fields.
After identifying these targeted underlying causes, you can make targeted improvements that data alone can’t suggest on its own.
Types of Usability Testing
Different types of usability testing can be conducted based on the business’s needs, budget, and technological advancements. Here we have mentioned a few commonly used methods for you to pick the best one for yourself.
Moderated Testing
Moderated usability testing requires a coordinator who moderates the test participants. He/she assists them as they progress through the research process and helps them if they have any queries or encounter difficulties, or ask supplementary questions along the way.
This can be conducted either in person or remotely. Moderated testing is categorised as a qualitative data gathering method, as the coordinator can observe the facial and body cues of the participant that would otherwise not come to the surface.
Unmoderated Testing
Unmoderated testing doesn’t include a coordinator who directly converses with the participants. This type of testing is faster because there’s no need to schedule a prior meeting with each participant. The nature of this study allows you to collect feedback from a large number of participants simultaneously.
It can even be conducted with international participants because you don’t have to match up the time zones of different countries. However, without a moderator, early prototype testing becomes difficult because at an early stage, they need help in recovering from errors or limitations of the prototype.
Card Sorting
A card sorting study uncovers mental models of the information architecture (IA) of your digital product. After analysing the information gathered from card sorting, users can find information on the website more easily.
Each participant is presented with the unsorted set of cards. In the process, participants place individually labelled cards into groups according to criteria that make the most sense to them. The cards usually include pages, links, images or descriptions of pages that users would navigate to on your website.
Eye Tracking
Eye tracking technology measures and analyses eye movements of test subjects to capture where their visual attention lies. The study is conducted using sensors and cameras that detect the position and movement of the eyes.
The system shines infrared light on the eyes, and this light is what makes reflections on the cornea and pupil. Eye tracking devices capture these reflections, algorithms analyse this data, and they identify the hot and cold spots on the website to determine where usability is compromised.
Tree Testing
Tree testing is a method that helps in strengthening the navigation hierarchy. To ensure that the information architecture of your website makes sense to users and that they can easily find key resources and features.
A task-based research method where you ask participants to look for key resources. This testing can be conducted even without creating a prototype, only a hierarchical menu (tree), which will be displayed as a series of accordions that represent the site’s navigation categories.
How Yellow Slice Helped Blue Earth Ace Their UX Design
Blue Earth is a marketplace for eco-friendly solutions. They have been pioneering sustainable growth and ecosystem protection through industrial decarbonisation to achieve net-zero. At Blue Earth, they help companies understand their climate impact and offer sustainable steps to achieve quality climate solutions.
The Problem: Blue Earth wanted us to redesign the UI of their website with a clear and straightforward approach to enhance user functionality and ease navigation. They wanted to increase the number of visitors to the BlueEarth website.
The Solution: The Sitemap was redesigned to improve the usability of the application. Typography and colour palette were designed to complement the business’s objectives. Illustrations and UI components were made to follow the lead.
The user interface was simplified to enhance its user-friendliness. We worked on enhancing the accessibility and navigation through UI modifications. Implemented functionality for the website to display Carbon Credit scores.
Experience Slice of Designing at Yellow Slice?
Having worked with prominent companies such as MakeMyTrip, NPCI, Axis Bank, and Croma (among many others), we have developed a deep understanding of best UX design practices. We take pride in advancing the human experience and deriving business results with intuition 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 are some effective tips for conducting usability tests?
To conduct effective usability tests that yield good results, you need to make users feel comfortable so that they are not hesitant to share their genuine opinions about the product or service. Researchers shouldn’t lead users to any specific answers.
Record the process at every step. And then step into analysis, identify patterns, pain points and insights. Don’t conduct usability testing once and forget about it; test early and test often.
2. What are the common mistakes that all designers/researchers make, and can you avoid them in usability testing?
To get reliable results from usability testing, avoid common mistakes such as testing with the wrong audience that doesn’t represent your actual target audience. Second, ignore minor usability issues, as they can accumulate and negatively impact the overall usability. Thirdly, failing to make active changes and not acting on feedback.
