by Cascade Waddell, Product Operations Analyst, ICT
Usability testing is the process of testing your product with customers to uncover key insights into user goals, behaviours, and pain points, offering a deeper understanding of how real users interact with your product.
It’s important for product teams to test their products qualitatively and quantitatively to see how a user interacts with a product, so you make product decisions based on facts rather than feelings.
The benefits of usability testing:
- Helps product teams understand real user needs and pain points, leading to solutions that truly meet their needs.
- It allows you to identify and resolve issues early, ensuring a smoother and more intuitive experience for users.
- Provides actionable insights and data to guide design and development choices.
- Encourages iterative development, keeping your product aligned with evolving user needs.
- Offers concrete findings to support discussions and secure buy-in from stakeholders.
How to design a usability test
Step 1 – Creating the test
Define the test goal and ensure it aligns with your product, company, and organisation goals. Choose a prototype or existing website to test. Prepare a test script you can use to ensure you have a structure with around 4 tasks.
Step 2 – Recruit your participants
Find 5-8 participants you want to test with. Offering a reward such as gift vouchers can incentivise people to participate in the test. Start recruiting early and expect some cancellations. Build a pool of users you can rely on.
Step 3 – Plan sessions
Plan for a 60-minute session overall. A good format to follow is:
- 10-minute introduction
- 40 minutes of tasks for participants to complete
- 10-minute summary and feedback session.
It’s important to keep an eye on the time to ensure there is sufficient time to summarise at the end.
Step 4 – Conduct the test
Before you start, ask for the test to be recorded. Explain the purpose of the test, encouraging thinking aloud. Guide the participants through the tasks and observe. Feel free to ask follow-up questions where necessary, but active listening is the most important skill you need to demonstrate during the test. Ask them how the test went after you’ve finished to improve for next time.
Step 5 – Analyse the data
Use an AI tool to analyse the transcript of the test looking for said pain points, mental models, positives, and negatives. Create a report with the key findings to be used to inform product leaders. This data will ultimately be used to inform the product roadmap.
Conclusion
Usability testing is a vital step in creating products that truly meet user needs. By following these steps ensures that you are creating products based on evidence rather than on gut feel.
Further reading
Usability (User) Testing 101 – NN/G
Just Enough Research: Hall, Erika [Amazon.co.uk]
If you’re interested in finding out more about this and other UX-related areas, join Imperial’s Digital Products UX Community of Practice Teams site. Sessions are run on areas of interest to the community.
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