In this fast-happening world, every business and every team wants to release the next update or the next application as soon as possible, because of this teams or UI/UX designers often miss out on a very important thing – properly testing the design. But why does this even matter? who focuses on testing anyways? can the users not give us feedback after release rather than taking feedback through testing? These are the questions designers ask and in this article, we will answer these questions.
In this article, we will discuss the need for testing in UI/UX, why it is so important, and why you must add it to your UI/UX workflow if you haven’t. But before that, we will start from the basics about what Usability testing or UI/UX testing is.
Need of Testing in UI/UX
Usability Testing or UI/UX Testing
A Usability study usability testing or UI/UX testing is 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 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.
The user’s feedback helps the design team make important improvements to the user interface and user experience. During the design process, usability studies can take place at different stages:
- Stage I (Conceptual testing): If you’ve got an initial idea you can conduct a usability study, this would be like a basic prototype that is just a little interactive. this is called concept 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.
Need of Testing in UI/UX
Following are the reasons on why do we need Testing in UI/UX designing process:
- Iterative Design: Not even the best of the best designers gets it right in the first go. even they can’t design a good user experience without iterative design driven by observations of real users. This make usability design an essential step in any good designer’s workflow.
- Finding Design Issues: Imagine this scenario. Your team designed a website, and they asked you to create a new feature that will allow customers to place orders on the website. You have created a prototype of the website that includes this new feature to place an online order. But how would you know the imperfections and mistakes you made in you design, for that you will have to conduct a usability study, gather feedback and improve those aspects of your design. The earlier you realize your mistakes as a designer, the better the design comes out. And you can only know those mistakes by getting a review from another designer, which may be costly, or simply getting it tested by the people who will thereafter also use your final product.
- Knowing the User: Usability testing is a great way to get to know the people you’re designing for. You can get a better sense of how your specific users see the world and what they want from your designs. These insights only help your website but also you to grow as a designer.
- Gathering user Observations: Usability testing is a great way to collect observations from users about your application or website. Observations about where do people get stuck? what confuses them? What errors do they run into? These insights are helpful before we release the application or website or rollout a new version. Always remember, user centricity is the key to a great design.
- Giving Users What Users Want: During creating new features, you as a designer might have your best intensions for the customers but only they know what they want. No matter how great the concept or the design is, customers will only use stuff that they actually need. UI/UX testing allows us to find a balance between what the business want, what you can deliver as a designer and what the user wants.
- Saves Resources and Time: UI/UX testing is very useful for saving the capital and human resources for a company. A feature that is anyways not effective and not going to be used by the customers can be discontinued rather than wasting time and resources on it. Another way in which UI/UX testing saves resources and time is that designers get to know their mistakes early, and those are immediately worked upon rather than realizing it during rollout and losing valuable customers.
Tools used for UI/UX Testing
There are many tools in the market for UI/UX testing, here is the list of the more useful tools widely accepted and used by the industry:
UserTesting:
UserTesting is one of the most popular tool for Testing the design, specially for mobile testing. UserTesting is widely used in the industry even by companies like Canva, GoDaddy, Microsoft, HP, etc. The most recent feature that they have added it their catalog is AI based analysis for better UI/UX. UserTesting provides us flexible pricing and you can choose to pay as per the three plans introduced by them:
- Essentials
- Advanced
- Ultimate
Features of UserTesting includes:
- Test builder and template gallery.
- You can even filter the users by Demographic.
- A dedicated Dashboard and metrics for how the design is performing.
- You can also get the Transcripts of the user Interviews.
- Integrations with applications like Slack, Jira, and Trello.
- Sentiment analysis to check if the product appeals to the user’s emotion or not.
- Card sorting and tree testing methods of UI/UX testing.
- Safe and Secured prototype testing.
- AI-powered analysis and insights.
Optimal Workshop:
Optimal Workshop is one of the best tool for working on User navigation and User Experience. If you are actually building information architecture, then this tool will be a great choice. Optimal Workshop is widely used in the industry even by companies like IBM, Uber, yelp, etc.
Features offered by Optimal Workshop are:
- UX research methods like card sorting.
- Tree testing: a method for testing the structure or architecture of any product’s design.
- Qualitative research.
- First-click testing.
- Online surveys for feedbacks from the users.
Lookback:
Lookback is widely used in the industry even by companies like Google, Nike, Spotify, Facebook, Netflix etc. There are two types of interviews you can do while UI/UX testing – Moderated interviews and Unmoderated interviews. And Lookback helps us with both type of user interviews.
Features offered by Lookback are:
- Usability testing for testing your application and website in mobile a well as larger devices.
- User Interviews for getting feedback.
Conclusion
All in all the need of UI/UX testing is immense. 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.
Usability study or usability testing or UI/UX testing is essential to a professional UI/UX workflow, make sure to keep in mind the points we discussed in this article before you design any product, application, website or a piece of software.