How to Perform UI/UX Testing ?

UI/UX testing or Usability testing is a research method for assessing how easy it is for participants to complete the important tasks in a design. In this fast and happening world where every business and every team wants to release the next update or the next application as soon as possible, we often miss out on what the customer actually wants. No matter how good our application features are, customers would only care if they solved their problems.

In this article, we will discuss how can we perform UI/UX testing or Usability testing in order to understand what customer wants and design our application respectively.

UI/UX Testing

What is UI/UX Testing?

UI/UX testing or Usability testing is actually a research method for assessing how easy it is for participants to complete the important tasks in a design. During a usability study, participants are provided with the designs/products, and researchers follow participants when they interact with the product/design. All the feedback from the users is then collected and worked upon.

Types of UI/UX Testing

There are two types of UI/UX Testing:

• Moderated Testing
• Unmoderated Testing

Moderated Testing

In Moderated Usability Testing, a person guides participants through the study in real-time. The person who guides participants through the study is known as the moderator. The moderator’s goal is to help participants interact with the product and collect their feedback along the way.

Unmoderated Testing

Unmoderated Usability Testing does not have a designated moderator. In unmoderated usability studies, participants test out the prototypes without human guidance. The study is generally recorded on video and is reviewed by the UX team later.

How to Perform UI/UX Testing?

We can perform UI/UX testing on your design by following this step by step process:

Step 1: Create a Prototype

The first step is that we start with building an entire application or website design or designing a new feature in order to test it.

Let’s understand how to perform UI/UX testing with the help of an example. Imagine this scenario, a business has a website, but customers can’t place their orders online. The business has asked you to create a new feature that will allow customers to order on their website. You decide to conduct a usability study to understand how easy it is for users to complete an order. The first step is to create a prototype of the website that includes this new feature to place an online order.

Step 2: Participates would navigate the entire prototype like users

The second step is to make the participants navigate the prototype from the landing page to checkout, acting as if they’re real customers. One must remember that don’t ask your participants to test like professionals, one should rather tell the participants to use the application or the new feature as id they are going to be used in the future.

In our example, We can hire some participants and make them navigate the new prototype of our business website.

Step 3: Collect feedback and interview participants

The third step is to collect feedback as you watch the users interact with the prototype. In some usability studies, participants can be interviewed after they’re done interacting with the prototype in order to get more feedback. We would recommend five to ten participants in the usability study. This sample size is large enough to uncover major user issues but small enough to keep the cost down.

In our example, we met a participant called Mr. Geek. As part of the study, Mr. Geek tries to order a product on the prototype of the business’s website. By following Mr. Geek through the ordering process, you discover that Mr. Geek’s user journey hits a problem. First, the product that Mr. Geek wants to order is pretty specific. He wants a very specific design on the product. But our website doesn’t have any such options even though we can create customer designed products. To solve this problem we have collected some feedback from Mr. Geek.

Step 4. Implement

The final step in the process of UI/UX testing is to work on the feedback collected by the participants and create a better prototype. Now our prototype is ready and properly tested by actual users so we can be sure that our design doesn’t hold any major issues.

In our example, the design team can now work out solutions to improve the busniess’s website. And in the next prototype, our users can now order a customized product from our business website.

Three Stages of UI/UX Testing

The user’s feedback helps the design team make important improvements to the user interface and user experience. Usability studies can take place at various points in the design process, here are thee important stages in design process where we can perform UI/UX testing:

• Stage I: You can conduct a usability study when you have an early idea, this would be like a basic prototype that is just little interactive. this is called Conceptual testing.
• Stage II: You can also conduct a usability study when you have an interactive prototype. This is where most of the designers conduct a study because it gives the design team insight on what needs to be revised or added before the product launches.
• Stage III: You can even conduct a usability study with a product when it is complete. This is done when you may want to change a feature of the product or test if the product is usable with a specific group of people.

Conclusion

Usability testing can help us discover new opportunities in our existing design and make improvements that is much needed by the users. It helps us in deeply understanding the problems that exist in our design and we can then come up with creative solutions. In this article we discussed the steps to conduct a successful Usability testing, make sure to follow the steps we discussed in this article if you are designing and testing any product, application, website or a piece of software.