Outcomes of Your Test - Evaluation
After completing individual tests the next step is to compile and carefully examine the results. This includes the structured and unstructured feedback, results from remote testing platforms, and additional feedback. The results will help you move your project to the next stage. Some examples of issues you are looking for could include:
Barriers to users completing the task/fulfilling the site goal
How to Test - Types of usability tests
Each type of usability test is best suited to answer a particular type of question. Articulating your testing question and knowing which test best responds to that question is key to your test’s success. Although some distinctions below are artificial it is helpful to familiarize yourself with the various tests before creating your own.
Why Conduct Usability Testing
While website usability testing is conducted for many reasons, primarily, it ensures that people can use your site. If they can't, they will find solutions elsewhere.
Usability testing can also help determine:
The Basics of Usability Testing
In this section, we will discuss the what, when and who of usability testing. what to test, when to conduct user testing, a variety of different types, and who to draw on as testers.
Exercise: Become the Tester
Usability testing is readily understood by navigating a website as if you were the tester. Perform the exercise below, and answer the questions to get a sense of a simple usability test.
What are Usability and Usability Testing?
A website should be easy and intuitive to navigate for the website user. Jackob Neilson defines usability as the “quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use.” Although user’s opinion of a site can be helpful, usability refers specifically to how well people engage with a website. Neilson develops five “quality components” that we will use throughout this guide as benchmarks for a usable site. These include:
Exploratory or Formative Usability Testing
Scenario: In the initial phases of development you want to judge users reactions to the design.
What/Why: Exploratory usability tests are done early in the design phase, often using paper prototypes*. This type of test requires a lot of interaction between the moderators and the testers. It can help surface
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