Usability Testing is more than Testing
Posted by Dan Eastwell
Simple usability testing as advocated by Jakob Nielsen with five users showed that user testing did not need to be an expensive procedure; products such as Morae allow 'usability labs' to be constructed from two laptops and a webcam.
This has made Usability Testing as practical and almost exclusively necessary part of the building of any interface (e.g. a simple website) or application (e.g. a website with any form of interaction)
Usability practitioners advocate testing throughout the design process, and not just as an afterthought once an application is built - this can be a simple procedure, with the most trying part being organising your five participants, but regular testing days can return rewards beyond optimising an interface for ease of use.
Get feedback
You can fairly quickly get feedback not only on how or whether your site works, but also on your users' general experience of similar sites, or real-world alternatives. How do your users normally find sign-up procedures? Are they worthwhile? Do they have trouble with so many passwords? Do they like newsletters? Are they familiar with RSS? And so on...
Incremental testing on rollouts
37 signals paved the way with progressive rollouts and testing constantly through this process allows you to fine tune your application. The danger of course is knee-jerk redesigns every time a user misses a button.
Get Evangelists
People will have volunteered for your user testing, especially if you've advertised through Craiglists or Gumtree, and you reimburse people for their time. Your test subjects will probably see this as something of a fun day out and should by the end of it be in a good mood. People love being asked their opinion, and enjoy being part of the process.
Regular testing will mean you have a constant stream of users who have not only seen your site, but have seen you and know you are keen to get things right. This will mean they're pretty likely to tell people about their fun day out and the nice people there. This can only be a good thing...
Contact with clients and creating superusers
In the same way a telephone call is better than an email, regular face-to-face meetings with your user base can lead to a positive reflection on your app/site.
Your users will be more forgiving of any future problems if they know that you're the kind of people who'll look into it, or probably are already.
Through showing people how your site works, possibly in much greater detail than they would find coming to it cold, you also get the equivalent of old school software 'training days', and a set of users who should end up knowing the workings of your site fairly well and, at best, are able to pass this knowledge on.
Regular testing, regular meetings
With all this in mind, it's probably worth conducting testing days even if you've got no significant changes to make to your site.
If you keep a database of past testees and those that you didn't have time for, you have the ability to keep in constant 'real-world' touch with your user-base.
User testing can be a very positive way of getting to know your end-users, and in a very focussed way - you have:
- A database of possible testers
- A database of people who know your site and can comment on future change
- A set of site evangelists
- Some possible future superusers
Your users:
- Have a more positive view of your site and it's working
- Become more likely to give you feedback normally
- View you not just a faceless frustrationas, but as 'human'.
