The importance of user testing and why it’s key to our process

3 Dec 2024

Tash Hockey

We consider usability testing to be an integral part of our project build process, as it assists in gaining valuable feedback from real users. It allows us to pivot and make changes prior to going live with a new website or app, and is an invaluable technique that saves us and our clients both time and budget.

TLDR: UX testing is amazing at providing insight into user journeys, pain points and potential opportunities, and saving on resources.

What is Usability Testing?

“Together with user research, UX testing is an indispensable component of user-centred design.“ – UX Design Institute

Usability testing is a method of acquiring feedback on the functionality of a website or app from a group of users. Despite being used interchangeably with user testing, both terms fall under the umbrella of UX (User Experience) testing. Where they differ is while user testing focuses on the needs and thoughts/emotions of the users, usability testing is focused more on the performance of the product and how the users interact with it.

The main benefits of undertaking usability tests are that it provides an insight into any potential pain points users may come across. It enables development teams to make human-centric products, allowing them to analyse their target audience’s behaviour when interacting with a product; this can, in turn, direct future iterations and improve the overall design. From a marketing perspective, it can be used to identify any issues within the sales funnel, and offers the chance to improve the customer experience.

How to test

In order to successfully gather data, it’s imperative to plan your usability test in advance. There are a number of steps to do this:

Decide on the things you would like to test
Choose your testing method – this will usually be determined by the goal of your test, the type of things you want to test, the resources you have to spend on users testing, and the answers to the following:
- Who are the users that you’d like to test with?
- Will it be held remotely or in-person?
- Will it be moderated or unmoderated?
Set your goals for testing, and define what success and failure will look like to you

Once you’ve decided these things, you can go about setting up your usability test. The earlier on in the project you begin user testing, the easier it will be to make improvements as development progresses. It’s recommended that you include no more than 5 users as your data source, as with any more than that, you’re likely to end up with recurring feedback that becomes unhelpful and wastes evaluative time.

After you’ve completed it, you’ll need to assess the data you’ve gathered, report on it to any stakeholders that are involved or responsible for signing off on further action, and then act upon the findings.

The various usability testing methods

There are a number of different ways that you can conduct usability testing. Each will have an effect on the cost and time, as well as the quality and type of data you’re able to capture.

Guerilla testing: Usability testing ‘in the wild’ e.g.: going out to the public and asking them to participate in a quick usability test, usually with some kind of incentive for taking part.
Card sorting: This is both a user research technique and a UX testing method. It helps to evaluated the information architecture of a product by asking users to sort cards labelled with various elements into a structure that makes sense to them. It’s useful in providing an insight into where and how users expect to find different types of information, and whether your current structure and content organisation matches up with this.
Observations: A ‘fly on the wall’ approach. It involves a moderator observing participants as they interact with your product and carry out a number of complex tasks. They usually don’t interact with the users, remaining passive observers.
Session recording: A way of capturing user interactions with the product in real time, showing where they run into problems – e.g. if a user clicks on the ‘back’ button, it could indicate a potential usability issue. Good for collecting large volumes of data.
First click testing: A look at where the user clicks first when asked to complete certain tasks – this is a useful method, as it provides a strong indication of the usability of your product.

Some of these methods can be used in conjunction with one another. We often use session recording and moderated observations to gather data, as we feel this is a particularly rewarding technique.

Our process

When we begin our usability testing process, we work with the client for the project to select a set of users to perform tests with. Creating a script allows us to introduce to the users what we’d like to test and the steps that will take place during testing, usually setting out a series of tasks for them to work through. It’s important that all users go through the same tasks in the same order to provide reliable and accurate data that we can then review and compare the results from. As part of the observation, we ask users to speak aloud, describing what they’re doing and their experience of the product. However, we endeavour to reassure users that it’s the product itself we’re testing, not them.

A tool we often use to run these sessions is Lookback. It enables us to see and hear exactly what the users are doing, and we can be on hand to assist them if required. When interacting with users, we use open ended responses, encouraging them to explore the website or app to find solutions, in order to maintain an unbiased result.

We use Figjam to document our testing sessions, with each task in its own column and a row for each participant. We’ll also record notes, demonstrating the positive and negative outcomes of the users’ experiences; then, at the end of the sessions, we review all of the feedback and pinpoint any improvements that can be made in the next iteration.

A real life example

When building the Sparrow platform we created for the United Nations, we undertook a number of user testing sessions to understand how UN colleagues would interact with it. This enabled us to make iterative improvements to the product. We worked closely with Naoko, our contact at the UN, to remotely conduct testing sessions with a team of 5 globally located users, all with differing levels of connectivity and device availability. This was a highly important aspect of the platform functionality to test, as many users are out in the field, where wi-fi availability and age of devices will impact their experiences of it.

“Sparrow allows me to identify relevant keywords and prominent social media stakeholders in countries under my purview. It supports targeted research and contributes to separating valuable information from information noise.”

Jean Charar, Political Affairs Officer at UN DPPA

Keeping the UN’s worldwide officers informed with this bespoke reporting platform.

Sparrow is a one-of-a-kind internal social media reporting platform built for the United Nations’ Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) to assist in providing up to date content analysis on global issues of conflict and humanitarian importance.

Achieving your goals

In conclusion, usability testing can provide key information to help improve your product. It allows you to validate your prototypes; identify issues with complex flows, demonstrating how straightforward or intuitive a multi-step flow is; catch a number of minor errors, such as broken links or grammatical errors; and create ‘buy-in’ for improvements with stakeholders. It also provides teams an opportunity to develop empathy with users – so often, development teams work in isolation, away from the end users, it’s easy to forget who you’re building for. We highly recommend implementing this type of testing into your development processes to improve your users’ experiences, and ultimately, your project as a whole.