UI/UX 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 wants. No matter how good our application features are, customers would only care if they solved their problems.
In this article, we are going to discuss What is UI/UX testing and the different types of it.
UI/UX testing
What is 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. 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: 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:
- 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. Imagine this scenario, a business has a website, but customers can’t place their orders online. The business has want a new feature that will allow customers to order on their website. The first step if you perform UI/UX testing is to create a prototype of the website that includes this new feature to place an online order.
- 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.
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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.
- In our example, we can have a participant called Mr. Geek who tries to order a product on the prototype we designed. By following him, we discover that Mr. Geek’s user journey hits a problem. Mr. Geek wants a very specific design on the product. But our website doesn’t have any such options. To solve this problem we have collected some feedback from Mr. Geek.
- 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. In our example, the design team can now work out solutions to improve the business’s website. And in the next prototype, our users can now order a customized product from our business website.
Importance of UI/UX Testing
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 Issue: 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 in order to know the imperfections and mistakes in you design, it is important to conduct a usability study, gather feedback and improve those aspects of your design.
- 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. 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.
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 about what is Usability testing? and its importance. 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.