USABILITY Testing

 In this article, we will see about Usability Testing and how it will performed and significance of it.

Firstly , What exactly is Usability Testing?

Testing the user friendliness of an application is called Usability testing.

Let us start with an example such that we have two applications A & B which are different but doing the same job. In this, we see which one is user friendly.

Given below are some of the parameters we look into for testing. In this most of them are not measurable,

ü  Speed

ü  Help

ü  Navigation should be simple

ü  Compatibility

ü  Look & feel

ü  Features

ü  Location of components

One important parameter other than the above said parameters is “Effort needed to learn the application”. 

Suppose in the example, we understand the software A in 2 hrs, but we take 4hrs to understand B. Let us see different cases here,

®    since we understand A in 2hrs, it becomes user friendly compared to B

®   suppose look & feel is not good for A. In this case though, we understand A in 2hrs, we cannot say that A is user friendly.

®    Therefore, we look into many parameters before we say user friendliness of a software

 What is LOOK & FEEL?

The application should be such that it should be pleasant looking [ suppose if we have red color text in yellow background, definitely we don’t feel like using it ] and make a feel to the end-user to use it.

 Let us now see an example of Usability testing:

1) Consider some of the examples below,

In this example, we see the Inbox – the most frequently used feature is not kept in the right place.

End – users therefore search for the Inbox & after sometime, they find the Inbox lying somewhere down.

This type of application may lose the customers because they are less user – friendly.

How to overcome this,

See to it that the important features are placed in the left navigation bar and top navigation bar (This is normally followed)

Then we should see whether frequently used features are easily accessible (like Inbox, Compose Mail etc)

While testing, we therefore have to list all the important features before we start testing an application.

2) Consider the sketch shown below,

The end – user to draw the above sketch every time, he clicks Tools -> Draw -> Line for each line and finally he clicks Tools -> Draw -> Line to complete the sketch.

In this , we see the end-user wants to draw a simple sketch, but he wastes his time in clicking each time the Tools -> Draw -> Line for the sketch. This becomes a waste of time for the end-user.

Therefore, while testing , we must make user friendly of the application by creating Tool bar which makes the job simple by clicking on the necessary tools instead of going & clicking each time Tool -> Draw -> Line

How to conduct Usability testing? (OR) What process will  follow to do Usability testing?

Prepare OR derive checklist (i.e, what are the points to be checked). If we don’t prepare a checklist, we may miss some features in the application.

For Usability testing, we should prepare a genuine checklist specific to the product we develop.

 Example of a checklist for an application,

ü  For this application, one of the checklists includes color of already checked link should be changed to red

ü  All the images should have alt tag(Tooltip)

ü  All the pages should have link to Homepage

ü  Login feature should have Forgot Password link

 Like the above checklist, we can derive as many checklists as possible based on the application (or) product. While deriving checklist, we should derive a common checklist which can be executed for all pages.

Hope the article helped you to understand about Usability Testing.

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Happy Testing!!!!