Usability Testing

Usability testing is a type of user research that focuses on observing the behaviours, struggles, and tendencies of users, sometimes in a formal usability testing lab, sometimes in their own use/work environment. The research findings from usability testing present an opportunity to design solutions to address these challenges.

Talking to users is a vital part of the design process and usability testing is one of the methods we use to get direct feedback on our designs to see where they could be improved.

Usability testing takes many forms depending on what you'd like to find out:

• in-person or remote
• moderated or unmoderated
• in a usability testing room, or guerrilla-style out in the public

There is a lot of variety in what we use to test with in a usability test as well. Depending on where we currently are in the project or what we're trying to find out, one artifact might be better than another. Here are some different types of artifacts I've had success with using:

• Paper Prototyping - Using sketches or printed out wireframes for usability testing.
  • Great for early stages of a project, this method allows you to quickly validate a design direction.
• Clickable Prototype Testing - Using a clickable version of wireframes or mockups to simulate flows through a website or application.
  • This type of testing can be used within the design process to test out design ideas in a more refined fidelity, but still in a stage where development changes can be made with low cost.
• HTML Prototype Testing - This can be using some of the great prototyping tools out there, or if needed, created using HTML/CSS/JavaScript and creating your own prototype.
  • These methods give users a more realistic experience of the website or application as they are testing and can either be through a completely stand alone prototype, not connected to the production system, or on an early, stable build of the project.
• Live System Testing - Testing using the current website or application allows us to test out specific flows or sections of the application in production to determine the current usability challenges customers are facing.
  • This is a fantastic, investigative method if your analytics/user feedback have shown specific areas challenging, or as additional benchmark testing to determine if design changes have addressed previously discovered challenges.

It is such a powerful way of vetting an idea or identifying issues with designs early to save development headaches later or to discover existing challenges that we can then address with design.

I have experience in conducting usability testing in many types of testing artifacts, including:

• Live system testing - either on later stage development code or the existing website/application
• HTML prototypes - testing on a prototype that was developed specifically for testing
• Clickable prototypes - either on mockups created as part of visual design or on wireframes
• Paper prototypes - testing using paper printouts of the wireframes or mockups created by visual design

I have experience running usability testing in the following ways:

• Formal - Stricter format of usability testing using a specific usability testing script and metrics specifically to evaluate an entire website, application, or a specific section of a website
• Informal - Exploratory form of usability testing that uses a higher fidelity testing artifact to test a new concept