Usability Testing revolves around using usability testing tools for testing of any particular website or application for its usage. Usability in terms of testing is a widespread term, which not only involves the ease of use but also involves the way it performs and how the product can behave when put forth under certain conditions.

To put things around our head it is first very important to know what exactly usability is, what are the different usability types and usability metrics and why it is of such pivotal prominence. Usability is the extent to which you can utilize any particular product to be in liaison with your goals in an effective and efficient manner with optimum satisfaction. Usability testing is extremely rigid in terms of its core and underlying principle.

Key Highlights of Usability Testing

• Centrally revolves around user satisfaction

• The parameters do not vary as per changing factors such as product requirements, the crux of the engineering used in building the product.

• It is mainly used to gather the usage, effectiveness, satisfaction ratio, optimum utilization, and efficiency of the product.

For example – Let us replace a web application in this case to a car to make things simpler. Whenever we are buying a car, we not only make sure that it is durable and strong both on an interior and exterior level but also want an attractive one. We might have heard several cases in which people order a certain color and wait for it for months. This is because they want a blend of both, a great design, an outstanding color, an exemplary finish along with a strong interior. All the above features come under the usability of a car, this defines the crux with which we can define the stable usability of the car. Similar is the case with a web application, people not only want attractive design and UI but also want a leak-proof and clean code to run the app.

Why the concern?

Let us talk in numbers:

• According to a report, Usability testing can enhance the sale of the application/product by 30 percent
• It also helps in decreasing the bounce rate of your site by 50 percent

These ratios are a generic consideration and generally tend to go higher than this. No business can afford to lose a massive chunk of their audience and hence necessitate usability testing making sure that nobody misses out on such a high number of visitors.

Why the need?

If we analyze the above-mentioned scenario along with the statistics, we can easily conclude that, if a prospective buyer visits your application and find it not meeting expectations in terms of ease of usage, navigation, and design they will just move out of the site and directly go for your competitor’s application. Usability testing goals work towards preventing this from happening.

User experience is one of the most important if not the most important aspect of making an online business successful.

The Complete Usability Testing Checklist

• Effectiveness Check

To check effectiveness means checking whether the user will be able to achieve the goal in precision with the alignment of the goal setting or not. This aspect of usability is mainly to check whether your website solves the core problem or not.

The main aim of this check is to ensure that your product does not move away from the core aspect of the user problem. The scope of this testing covers a wide range: right from functionality to features to content.

• Efficiency Check

Efficiency is highly concerned with the speed of achieving a certain goal. The faster you tend to achieve a goal the better is your efficiency. Efficiency is checked with the number of keystrokes which that are required to achieve any particular goal to better optimize the web application. With lesser keystrokes come better clarity and a higher sense of ease in achieving the goals.

For example– Let us consider Navigation as one of the factors that will determine the level of efficiency, the better you can navigate a site, the easier it is to use it. However, difficulty in navigating is considered a turn off in terms of ease and thus an inefficient application.

• Engagement check

In this case by Engagement, we mean the capacity with which we are able to withhold the attention of a user to stay put on a particular application, product, or website. This a rather quantitative field that needs to be tested.

There are many visual elements that are responsible to affect this check. Be it a good design, a dynamic site or attractive colors and slide shows.

• Error Tolerance check

This aspect of usability check works towards minimizing the errors that occur on the application regularly. This functionality works towards making your website error-tolerant. An undo, redo, etc acts as a small part of this check, this is done in order to make sure that even if you do something by mistake, you get a chance to have your changes back to the original state. In order to enhance this functionality, you have to try and do every error that you can and then ask yourself if there is a way to repair it.

• Ease of acceptance check

Ease of acceptance is a very important aspect for your growth as that shows how easily can your users actually learn to use your product and quickly can they grasp around the feature updates. This tells you a lot about your product as well, especially about how easy or tough is it to use on an average. It is advisable to perform a thorough check from end user’s perspective

Usability Testing is one of the most important aspects of any application. It helps you in gauging:

If the product

• meets market expectations
• If your business decisions are in sync with real-world use
• Find errors in the product before the users find it.
• Get proper feedback about the product from the end user’s perspective.
• Measure wisely about the success or failure of the application.

This helps you in building a time-efficient and effective application which in turn generates great revenue for you.