In todays class we learnt all about usability testing, and how we go about it when it comes to UX design. Usability testing is when we test our products before they are released, and this gives us a feel to what elements of the product work or not. This gives us the opportunity to fix these problems before the product is released to users.
When designing digital products, we should be doing it in a way that allows the user not to have to think when they use them. The user shouldn’t have to wonder what a button does, or what some text means. Everything should be obvious to the user, and we should always be asking “How can I make the users job easier?”. A practical way we can do this is by following design principles such as contrast or hierarchy to give the user as much hints and prompts as possible so that they can do their task easily.
Eye-tracking is a common way to test how users interact with digital products. Eye-tracking is pretty cool as we can literally see where people are looking at a screen, and this will help us understand how they interact with different elements. We can use this in usability testing by looking at what elements the users are turning their attention to, and then use that to understand what elements are most important to the user on the screen. Research shows that because of eye-tracking and how the eyes work when it comes to reading, we know that when typing paragraphs there are measures that are objectively better than others. This is because our eyes prefer to read something where the lines aren’t too long, but also aren’t too short.
Usability tests is when you test a digital product before it is released. Usability testing is simply to inform our judgement, not to try and prove ourselves to other team members. We should typically be testing with a general audience, but this isn’t always the case. When designing for a very specific user, and no other user would be using the product, this is when it is appropriate to test with only that target user. Nielson Norman think that 5 users is an appropriate number to test with. They say this is enough testing to find around 80% of your problems. It is good to have a screen recording of the testing, as well as the audio. This will give us more information as to how the user is interacting with the product, and there thoughts/feelings. A typical usability test will feature a participant, facilitator, and an observer. A think aloud protocol is when we get the participant to talk through and describe what they are thinking. It begins with a prototype, and the participant will perform the task, while they are describing what they see and do. There are 3 usability metrics that we are looking out for:
It is never too early to test a product. We can start usability testing with sketching, mid-fi wireframes, or high-fi screens. The sweet spot is a clickable Figma prototype, where the user can interact and actually use the product in its stripped down form. This way it is not too late to make big changes, and it is not too early where we have nothing to be tested. Testing isn’t something that we do just once, but we should be doing it often to keep our designs functional. Depending on what stage we are at, we can either do ‘get it’ testing, or ‘key’ task testing. Get it testing is when we simply just see if the user can do the task that we are wanting them to do. Key task is when we see how a user actually uses the product, and what they were thinking. This is the better of the two, as it provides us with more information on what they were thinking throughout the process of the task.
SUS is a method that is used to score our products, deriving from the information gathered from the usability test. SUS means System Usability Scale, and gives us a score for how well our product performed. The SUS scale is based of user-centered questions, ensuring that our priorities are the users needs and how satisfied they were with the product. It is important not to change the order of the questions so that we can compare our results with other designs. A good score from a SUS test is around 68, but this doesn’t mean that we can wrap up testing. We always have improvements to make and usability testing will always give us constructive feedback. I think that SUS is a great framework for getting testing feedback.
We then were split into groups of 3 and given the task of conducting our own usability tests. We had to go onto the Ulster University website, and complete 3 different tasks. We each took turns being the participant, facilitator, and the observer. The tasks we were given was: