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The Secret to Building Products That Users Love
Why do usability testing?
It reduces the risk of building the wrong product.
If done right at an early stage, usability testing can help you spot problems when they are still easy and cheap to fix, thereby saving you loads of money, time, and resources.
The mistake I’ve made most often is saying yes to a client’s feature request — the product I worked on ends up as a Frankenstein of different platforms merged together.
Do you want a dashboard? Ok.A Kanban board? Yea… why not.How about a chat interface? Sure.
And this was a bad idea. The more things a user can do, the more complicated the product is. We ended up shutting the project down early and never going to market.
Why? Because it was not user-friendly.
The success of every product in the market is dependent on the user’s experience with that product and usability testing can help ensure the product you are building is convenient to use and easy to learn.
In this article, we discuss:
- The importance of usability in product development
- Step-by-step guide to Usability Tests
- How Google are the Jedi’s of usability since 1988
Let’s dive in 👇
The importance of Usability in Product Development
Usability testing involves observing users as they try to complete tasks, often conducted repeatedly from early development until a product’s release.
During these tests, designers and stakeholders will try to understand certain behaviours and patterns and provide actionable recommendations to improve the usability of your product.
The purpose of this test is to ensure the plan for a product’s functions, features and purpose are in line with what users want by observing how real-life people use the product.
Yes, the design of your product should be visually appealing but if your user experience sucks, then it has failed to fulfill its role to meet customer needs.
Usability testing is largely a qualitative research technique and is not driven by statistics like surveys where lots of people participate. Usability testing is done using a small set of people, usually five to seven.
Usability tests step-by-step
Preparations
- Define a prototype.
- Consider the goals or workflows for testing. As a starting point, use user personas, job stories, or user stories as a guide to define tasks or goals to test.
- Define success criteria for each task.
Testing plans
- Create a testing script that includes the purpose, chosen samples, testing method, a rundown of the tasks to perform, and questions you will ask your user.
- Get help for your usability testing session! Ask friends or colleagues to stand in as notetakers.
- Define a sample. 5 people is an optimal number to acquire all the insights needed since they spot 85% of all usability issues.
- While performing the tests, make sure to have Quicktime, Sunflower, or another recording tool running. You can then revisit to clarify notes and/or analyze behaviors.
When you should be doing usability testing:
- Before designing a new product or feature.
- Before developing and launching a new product or feature.
- After launching a product or feature. Even once you’ve launched a product or feature, you should continue to run usability tests to identify areas for improvement.
Usability test checklist
Google keeps it simple since 1998
Google users search a staggering 3.5 billion times every day. That’s 1.2 trillion searches per year!
How did Google become this successful? Search.
It doesn’t require a tutorial or a tooltip. It doesn’t show by default a million filtering options. One input box, that’s it.
Just type in what you want to search and hit Enter.
Even the early version of Google Search is the same, albeit with a few additional links at the bottom.
20+ years and the only change with Google Search is removing the additional links. They’ve made the UI simpler, less distracting, and the only function more obvious.
Key takeaways
In the incredibly competitive landscape of digital products, usability testing offers a chance for better business and design processes.
In addition to everything that I have covered, usability testing enables you to:
- Removes flaws in the product
- Spot problems and remove flaws
- Matches business decisions to the real-world
- Gain a deeper understanding of your target users
- Ensure that your designs function meets your users’ needs
- Identify areas for improvement and opportunities for innovation
Remember, anyone designing a product should be aware of the importance of usability testing and understand the plan to conduct these tests.
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