Any website that is user-friendly, rich in features, has desired products and services, relevant information, and loads the site pages faster, has all the best chances in the universe to make visitors stay for longer on the site.
If you go to any website such as Amazon, eBay, Myntra, and Snapdeal, you can seamlessly surf through the site as the pages and images will load faster, and you will end up making a purchase even if you were just window shopping on the site.
In today’s world, a great and phenomenal website heavily depends on how the users perceive it and their experience. The ease of usability and delightful user experience guarantees your business a vast number of visitors staying longer on your website.
In this blog, we will walk you through what usability is, why it is critical for websites, and what usability testing is, its advantages, methods, and process.
What is usability, and why is it critical for websites?
With the increase in competition in the market due to a vast number of businesses existing in the market selling similar products, customers have options and purchasing power to influence the seller.
In the growing competition, design and content on the website are not solely to rely on for retaining the users. You must focus on engaging, interactive, intuitive, and responsive user experience.
In simple terms, Usability is “the extent to which targeted users can use a product/service to achieve specified goals with efficacious and satisfaction in the specified period (content) of its use.”
Hence, every integral part of your website must be user-friendly and responsive to draw visitors. It can be achieved with the assistance of Usability testing.
What is Usability Testing, and how it helps in ensuring the usability of a website?
Taking reviews from people regarding the functioning and critique of your website is a lucrative task, but it is time & cost-consuming. This process is effective in multiple industries and helps improve the user experience.
Usability testing is an effective method of user research and review. It helps validate the design decisions for an interface and verify its quality, accessibility, & usability by running a test with representative users.
It helps create an engaging website that connects with users, thereby building credibility and trust and enhancing customer satisfaction.
Usability testing is conducted by the UX Designer or usually by the user researcher during every iteration of the product (application), enabling them to detect different issues that users encounter with the website and resolve them to give a seamless website experience to the user.
Usability testing ensures that the website interface is built in such a manner that it befittingly fits the users’ expectations, requirements, and needs.
To summarize, usability testing determines the user-friendliness of the website interface and whether the visitor will return to the site.
Advantages of Usability Testing
Investing in Usability Testing in the current decade is one of the most intelligent decisions to make your website visitors and potential clients happy by giving them a seamless experience and reaping multiple benefits. It will increase your business ROI and create a prominent name in the market.
The following are the advantages that you will get with Usability testing:
Improved Retention Rate
A bounce rate is a significant loss for any business and slips out potential long-term prospects. Customer retention is the primary focus and income generation in any business industry.
Usability testing helps organizations improve retention rates by assisting them to comprehend the reason behind bounce rate and users not staying on the site for long and accordingly take preventive measures to tackle the situations.
Comprehending user behavior
Usability testing helps the website testing team determine the most engaging elements on the site, which further helps identify user behavior patterns for creating a user-friendly website interface.
Detecting bugs
Usability testing offers excellent support to the testing team by detecting the bugs, errors, and defects that are not visible to the developers and rectifying them instantly so users can enjoy a seamless experience on the website.
Reduction in Costs
Usability testing is one of the most economical testing. It helps you save a colossal amount on creating a whole new website or redesigning the existing one to meet the users’ requirements and enhance their experience.
Reduction in help desk calls
If the website is lagging, taking time to load, and having bugs, then be ready to receive an abundance of help desk calls.
Usability testing helps you overcome this challenge as it will help the testing team minimize the number of support calls by rapidly solving the bugs and defects.
Usability Testing Process
Usability testing is straightforward and can be conducted by developers, testers, or appointed users. The following are the five steps involved in the Usability testing process:
Planning
The first step in Usability testing is identifying the goals & defining the testing scope. Apart from these two, teams determine usability study cost, create a testing plan & strategy, and agree on the definite metrics.
Recruiting
After the plan is formulated, the team and required resources are assembled and assigned specific tasks. The team manager/leader defines the set of tools and templates that will be used in Usability test execution.
Test Execution
In the third step, the team executes the plan and strategy to perform Usability testing. The team captures unbiased results and communicates the testing scope.
Analysis
Once the usability test is executed, the next step is to categorize the results to identify similar patterns among them for generating inferences.
Reporting
The last and vital step after the analysis of results is reporting. The team provides actionable and lucrative recommendations for rectifying issues identified during the testing and also provides a briefing to the stakeholders.
Methods used for Usability Testing
For Usability Testing, various methods are available for the UI/UX Designers and developers to perform the test, giving the required results to the team to determine the website’s usability. The following are primary and commonly used methods used in Usability testing:
A/B Testing
A/B Testing, also known as split testing, is primarily used for experimental analysis. In this method, two versions are compared by the team, and evaluate, which of the two versions performs the best and is suitable for the website. This testing method used qualitative and quantitative analysis to validate the intended goal.
Remote Usability Testing
This testing is primarily used when the user and researcher are based in different geographical locations. This test is reviewed by an evaluator who interacts with participants via various screen-sharing tools.
This method gives developers more realistic insights and allows them to conduct more number of researches in a shorter duration.
Co-discovering Learning
This method involves grouping the users for product (application) testing and is being observed. Test users normally talk with each other and define their opinions for the allocated task.
It helps measure the time taken to complete different tasks and instances where users ask for assistance.
Expert Reviews
This method involves UX experts who review the product (application) to detect bugs or defects, and they evaluate it with the assistance of the following techniques:
- Cognitive Walkthrough
- Heuristic Evaluation
- Checklist
Eye-Tracking
This method captures physiological data of users’ conscious and unconscious experiences with the website interface.
This testing method captures eye motion and tracks eye movement and position to analyze user interactions and the time taken between clicks. It helps the testing team identify the most eye-catching, confusing, and ignored features on the site.
Conclusion
After reading the entire blog, you will be familiar with the advantages, process, and usability testing methods. At Calidad Infotech, we provide top-notch quality Usability Testing services and are one of the leading software testing companies in India.
For any questions regarding Usability testing and quotation for our Usability testing services, contact us at +91-9909922871 or email at hello@calidadinfotech.com.