13 January 2023
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7 June 2023
14 Minutes Read 
BY
Satya Madhavi Mukku
The two major software testing types include Functional and Non-functional testing types. Functional testing involves the testing of the functional aspects of the product, app, or website to ensure the functionality works as per the defined requirements. The different types of functional testing include Unit testing, Smoke testing, Functional testing using Test Automation, System integration testing, User acceptance testing (UAT), etc. Whereas Non-functional testing evaluates how the system (product, app, website) performs in terms of quality attributes such as scalability, reliability, usability, security, and performance. The different types of Non-functional testing methods include Usability testing, Performance & Load testing, Scalability testing, Security testing, Accessibility testing, Compliance testing, etc. Usability Testing Strategy plays a vital role in the quality of a product.
This blog deals in detail with the various aspects of Usability testing, especially how to get a good and effective usability testing strategy for modern agile testing, and also deals with its need for enabling a seamless User Experience (UX) for today’s digital businesses as UX is the heart for enchanting customers with a seamless customer experience (CX).
Usability testing is a type of Non-functional testing method that involves testing products, apps, and websites by real-time users to determine how easily users can understand and navigate through the user interface of the product, app, or website. Typically, this software testing method helps to identify if there are any usability issues and recommends improvements to ensure the product, app, or website is easy to use and delivers a great UX for today’s digital customers.
There are different types of Usability testing methods such as Cognitive Walkthrough, User Groups, Focus Groups, Heuristic Testing/Evaluation, Contextual Inquiry, Participatory Design, and Comparative Testing which should be leveraged by digital businesses to ensure their apps deliver a great UX.
There are certain basic underlying principles for usability testing which should be adhered to identify user pain points, enhance the UI design and navigation and deliver a great UX.
Undoubtedly, Usability testing forms an important part of software testing for digital businesses especially for eCommerce businesses along with banking apps and Fintech apps, as these business customers directly deal with and interact with these apps and websites everyday. Thus, businesses need to ensure their apps are seamless and easy to use to deliver a seamless UX.
Digital businesses gain many benefits by leveraging usability testing, as listed below:
Usability testing is an essential part of the software testing process and helps to improve the product UI and design. The actual process of usability testing has been detailed below.
It is essential to follow the below steps to achieve an effective usability testing strategy for agile testing.
The teams need to understand the context behind a product or app, and how it should look like. They should then decide on what goals and objectives need to be accomplished with the usability testing strategy within the agile and DevOps implementations. The testing teams should identify the sort of key information that they need to be extract from this testing process.
After defining the usability test goals and objectives, it is essential to identify the specific people (focus groups) (real users) who will be conducting the usability tests. It is important to choose and select the target users who will be using the product, app, or website. You should develop an evaluation plan and schedule it for conducting usability tests on the software. Plan and determine which routes to take users through, how to identify and manage users, and how to identify user groups. This step ensures that you are testing the software with actual users, who represent different user groups.
This step is a key step in selecting an effective usability testing methodology and tools for modern agile testing which also depends on the context. Select and choose from the wide range of usability testing tools that serve the purpose of either testing your product, app, or website.
This step includes the creation of test scenarios and test cases to assess the usability of the software under test. By structuring the approach to usability testing, this step ensures that testers test all key areas. It is critical to use the personas as a base and develop detailed test cases. When creating each test case, you should include the expected outcome and any additional data points that you need to measure success. You should establish the test environment to conduct successful usability testing.
It is necessary to build user personas that help to understand how different user groups interact with the software. This step helps to identify potential usability issues that may arise in different scenarios. Hence, it is essential to create user personas representing typical users of the product. Each persona typically has a detailed profile including demographic information, behavior patterns, and pain points if any to be known and tested. Also, construct tasks that you want users to accomplish during the test and create a list of questions for users to answer.
After having all the above steps covered, it is time to perform and conduct the usability test according to the test plan and collect the necessary data and results. Further, make sure the test is easy to understand and results can be easily interpreted and shared with the respective teams.
Finally, after conducting the tests, analyze the data collected from the test to identify any usability issues. This final step involves collecting and analyzing the data and making recommendations on how to improve the product’s UI. It is also essential to regularly communicate the final findings with stakeholders and other teams. The results should be analyzed to know about the feedback of the testers (real-users who test) about any usability or design issues and take remedial measures as suggested for improving the product’s UI.
The last step includes incorporating user feedback into product improvements and re-test the areas of the product with usability problems. This step ensures that the product is as user-friendly as possible. The changes and recommendations about usability and navigational flow as suggested by the real users (testers) should be implemented to improve the product or the app’s UX.
Finally, it is important to perform the usability tests early and often to achieve the maximum benefits from this testing process. But, the usability test strategy and planning are important to get desired results which ensures a great product that enables a great UX.
Usability testing strategy implementation involves various roles that participate in the testing process and ensure the UI design and navigation is seamless and user-friendly. The participants involved in this testing process are:
As already mentioned above, usability testing is an effective testing method for agile and DevOps implementations which helps to improve the UX of digital businesses’ products, apps, and websites. We use this testing method to evaluate and measure the user’s reactions to a product or app. It also helps to identify usability issues either with the user interface or with the design and delivers constructive feedback, thus ensuring a great UX.
Furthermore, we will use this feedback to improve the design and development of a product. This testing method also helps digital businesses to understand the user needs, make the user interface more intuitive, and ensure the UI navigation is more seamless, and content is accessible, thus ensuring an improved UX. Therefore, businesses should leverage usability testing to ensure they optimize their products’ UI to meet user expectations and deliver a great UX.
In agile and DevOps processes for products, software, apps, and websites, adopting usability testing is essential to ensure the UI and design are easy-to-use and enable a great UX. Let us see some of the Usability testing Use cases:
Usability testing helps to identify possible pain points and areas for improvement of the websites and web apps and ensures end users have a user-friendly experience with an improved UX.
Usability testing helps to understand how users interact with mobile apps and how easy are the app’s user interface and navigation to ensure maximum efficiency and seamless usage for users.
Usability testing ensures how easy is the user interface design and helps to identify UI issues that users may encounter while interacting with it.
By performing usability testing, it helps to identify whether a product meets the standards expected by users and notifies issues about UI and design.
Today digital users perform many activities such as shopping, banking, buying an insurance policy, etc using mobile apps or websites. The usability of these apps is critical for customer-facing apps and usability testing helps to know about the usability issues.
There are different types of Usability tools (Open-source and commercial) for businesses to leverage and perform the testing process. Below, we provide some of the commonly used usability testing tools.
This user experience testing platform helps to determine how users interact with products, apps, and websites. Some of the tool platform features include card sorting, prototype tests, first-click tests, design surveys, preference tests, and five-second tests.
This is an important usability testing tool for businesses to optimize digital channels with customer feedback. Helps to collect real-time feedback on websites to optimize them. Some of the tool features include a dashboard, analytics, sentiment analysis, feedback management, task segmentation, survey management, and predictive analysis.
It is an online usability testing tool that helps businesses understand how users interact with their products or apps. It provides video-based user feedback to ensure better products and better results. Some of its features include prototype testing, concept validation, first-click testing, and heat maps.
This tool is a suite of design, research, and collaboration tools that help product design teams to build and deliver a great UX. It includes a wide range of tools, from card sorting to surveys, and tree testing methods that help teams get effective user insights.
It is an analytics platform and website usability testing tool that helps to know how website visitors interact with a website. It provides heat maps as visual depictions of visitors when they click or scroll a page. Some of the other tool features include conversions, page optimization, live chats, etc.
Software testing forms a major part of product or app development and one of the non-functional testing methods named Usability testing is an important testing method that determines the effectiveness of the actual usability of the product or app. Digital businesses need to leverage usability testing strategy for all critical applications as it helps to know whether the product meets the user expectations and gives clarity about the user reactions and feedback about the product or the app.
Therefore, digital businesses should adopt an effective usability testing strategy to gain the complete benefits of this testing method. Thus, today’s agile businesses should adopt usability testing methods in both agile and DevOps processes to gain insights about the product in advance and make necessary changes if any, based on what is suggested by the users who test the product as it ensures to deliver a great UX to the users.
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