First and foremost, let’s answer the most important question here i.e. What exactly is usability testing? Usability testing is an effective technique that helps you analyze how user-friendly your application is. This type of testing targets mainly the look and feel of your application and how easily it enables the users to accomplish their goals while using it. Usability testing is ideally performed by real-end users of the app that helps identify any challenges or problems that they encounter during their whole experience. Now moving forward with the blog, let’s keep one thing in mind that this article will only focus on usability testing in the light of mobile applications.
Why is Usability Testing Important?
This type of testing is important because most of the time it happens that the dev team and the owners of the app overlook some kind-of obvious usability issues due to their in-depth knowledge of the app. They are not able to determine how a real user will feel about the app and react to its features. Therefore, usability testing is conducted by the real audience where they interact with the app and provide their response regarding any confusion that they might have faced while achieving their targets, any usability problems that they might have encountered or any suggestions that will help improve their entire experience.
However, in this era of tech and innovations; there still exist some organizations that do not believe in testing and Quality assurance. For them, usability testing is just a waste of cost and time. They do not realize that having just a minor usability bug can cause them a customer in a second or so. Users download and install applications to accomplish some goals and if they are not able to do so in their first attempt or the functionality or flow of the application is not quite clear to them, they do not take a minute before opting for another application. Thus, usability testing has become very critical to gain customers and also to maintain them.
How to perform usability testing of Mobile Apps?
In order to perform effective usability testing of Mobile Apps, there are certain steps that need to be followed.
1. Defining objectives:
The first step is to define the objectives. We must be very clear about our audience, what features or functions of the app that we want them to perform testing on and the similar apps that can be our competitors. We cannot collect meaningful results if our objectives are not clearly defined and we do not have a usability testing plan. A proper roadmap should be designed to have a clear picture of what we are trying to achieve through this testing.
2. Setting up the tasks for the testers
The second step is to be clear about what functions or features of the app we are targeting in this plan. The testers should be provided with a set of tasks to perform by using the app that must be raw, realistic and clear. Make sure that the testers are not given any instructions or hints rather just some very clear test scenarios. Let them perform the test cases on their own by understanding and exploring the app. This helps identify real scenarios that a user might face while using the application.
3. Test Documentation
The third step again depends on having very clear objectives. After conducting usability testing activity, the thing that is of major importance is results. These results can prove to be quite overwhelming if we are not clear with what we are trying to achieve here. People can be very subjective while giving suggestions and opinions. We need to set our priorities straight and know exactly what we are looking for. Certain questionnaires should be designed having very precise questions about the app and the related user experience to collect meaningful data.
4. Choosing test participants
This step also depends on step 1. If the target audience of the app is not clear, there is no way that you will be able to achieve the desired results. So when deciding who will be the testers, the genre of the app and what audience it targets, must be very clear. For example, for a gaming app, it is obvious that the target audience shall be the youth but you cannot just include every teenager in your testing group irrelevant of what gender they belong to. All games do not target all genders. Similarly, other factors like race, age, religion, etc must be considered too.
Secondly, another thing that is important while coming up with your testing group is what kind of usability testing you want to perform. It can either be qualitative or quantitative. It totally depends upon your test plan.
5. It’s high time for Test Execution
Now when everything is ready, it’s time that you start your usability testing activity. Make sure it is set up in a place where you can observe your testers while they perform certain tasks. It would be great if you can record the entire session too.
In the end, collect data from the users and prioritize this feedback. Now, you can start working on making your application more user-friendly and work towards achieving better targets.
How QA is involved in Usability Testing?
Usability testing is performed by a set of users that we defined to test an application but what if we do not have that set of users available for some reasons like we cannot make the application available to all users or we do not have much time to arrange an audience, define objectives and their tasks so in this case usability testing is and should be performed by a QA Specialist who is also responsible to carry out other testing types on that application and he should always use an application from normal user’s perspective while testing.
Furthermore, a QA engineer should sit with the designers as they develop an app wireframes and prototypes, help them out with the scenarios and personas. So a QA engineer can also be involved in the early stages of application for usability.