How Important Is Usability Testing For A Designer?

In our recent blogs, I tried to focus on a few primary designing ideas that must be followed while creating an attractive website. Apart from designing an appealing website, it is essential to keep in mind the usability and convenience of the user. No matter how advanced your website design is, but it will perform well only when it is easily accessible and usable to the end user.  So, what we actually mean by the term “Usability”?

In general, usability means the ease of accessing. Similarly, in case of software or web-designing, usability refers to how easy a website or software design is to its users considering their knowledge and experience. Here, we talk particularly about website usability.

Considering usability as a major aspect of designing, its very crucial to employ usability testing while designing.

 

Why Should We Perform Usability Test?

In web designing or other graphic designing, usability test is performed to ensure whether a website performs well or not as per the proposed design set up and the desired functionalities. The principal objective behind such testing is to collect opinion  from the users who are not familiar with the product and who experience it for the very first time. As per their review, the overall work is evaluated considering various factors like,

• How convenient it is for them to accomplish a specified task
• Whether they find it interactive
• How long it takes to locate what they have been looking for

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Usability Test is divided in following categories:-

Explorative Test:- This is an early test phase that aims to forecast the product development process and assessment in advance by means of having opinions from users and based on the prototypes.

Assessment Test:- Assessment test is performed during the process of development. During the development phase, ongoing work gets reviewed and performance is evaluated. It is based on the real-time trials of the technology being used and determines satisfaction, effectiveness and usability.

Comparative Test:- It is a comparison test that compares two similar projects based on their functionalities and the performance. Comparing projects helps evaluating the work by following an achievable goal in terms of efficiency and usability.

 

Methods Used In Usability Testing:-

 

• Hallway Testing:- In this testing procedure, a few random people are picked with basic knowledge to test the website’s usability and their experience is noted. This method is very useful while testing new websites.

• Remote Usability Testing:- This testing procedure deploys people remotely to test the performance of the website. At present, there are certain software and tools that test website’s performance without the need of technical tester.

• Expert Review- Experts belonging to the specific domain review the product and send the review report back and based on the expert review, changes can be made. This comparatively consumes less time and helps assuring technical functionalities.

 

• Automated Testing:- Since advancements in technology, too many automated test environment are created that performs quality checks and provides automated reports.

Once you are done with the usability testing of your website, the best thing to focus is on the common issue that has been encountered in most of the cases. Sometimes, certain issues might not have much of the impact on usability but it might require to make few major changes to your design to get rid of them. In such cases, it is better to avoid such changes as it may have impact on quality of the website.

Oodles Studio is one of the leading graphic design companies that specializes in most of the designing domains to provide its clients with best of the products in terms of usability and business extensibility.