From the course: UX Insights Weekly

What is a usability test?

From the course: UX Insights Weekly

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What is a usability test?

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- Usability testing is a way to find out how well a system meets users needs. Whether that system is your product, a competitor's product, or even a completely manual process. Let's be really clear, the word test refers to the product. You're never testing your participants, they're helping you to test the product. Early in the product development process, you'll run formative tests so you can learn about users worldview, the way they work, the language they use, and the pain points they experience. Closer to when you release, summative usability testing helps you work out whether you created an interface that users can understand that fits with their world view and helps them perform their tasks efficiently, effectively, and with high satisfaction. So early on, you're doing usability testing to build theories about how to solve users pain points and later in the product development cycle, you'll do usability testing to check whether your assumptions were correct. You can get similar information by visiting people where they work to watch them do their jobs or just interviewing them, but usability testing allows you to control things a bit more. For a start, you're watching people do tasks rather than just talking about their jobs. And it's tasks that you choose rather than whatever they happen to be doing that day. The biggest downside of usability testing is that because you have to standardize the environment, things can become a little artificial. But, if it's used alongside other formative methods, usability testing is a great way to track your progress towards meeting your usability goals, because you can perform usability testing in your own offices, it's easy for other team members to come and watch the tests and experience users' pain firsthand. During a usability test, you're capturing data on what people say and what they do. Mostly, you're interested in whether the interface you're testing met their idea of how the task should be performed and whether it guided them the right way. It's important to recruit highly representative users to participate in your usability study. Because these participants are the type of people who'll be using the product in real life, you'll only need around eight people per round of usability testing in order to find the majority of the important issues. Because you're using a small number of people per round of testing, you can afford to run several usability tests as your product materials from prototype to the finished code. If you need to run a usability study of your product you can find the full details on how to set it up in my usability testing course.

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