What are Usability Testing methods in Singapore?
“The user experiences usability first and pays later.”
——Jakob Nielsen
Jakob Nielsen is a“Web usability master ”. His famous phrase that on the web means that users are always at a click away from leaving a website they are in if they do not find it usable.
What is Usability
Usability is used to evaluate how easy to use a product, including Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Satisfaction. It can be anything, such as machine, tools, process, software or website. Anything that interacts with people should be useful. Specific to website and software application, usability is defined as how easily ordinary people use software and website to reach a specific goal.
Usability Goals
The goals of usability are:
- Usefulness
Whether it can help user realize the specific goal.
- Effectiveness
95% of users can download the software correctly at the first trial.
- Accessibility
How to make the product more usable for the special scene and people, for example, vulnerable groups.
- Learnability
How easy for the novice user to finish a task of using the website.
- Efficiency
Speed, 95% of users can finish downloading the software in 10 minutes.
- Memorability
User comes back to use your website after a while.
- Errors (as in low error rate)
How easy the product allows the user to make mistakes, how serious it is, and how easy it is for the user to recover the mistakes.
- Satisfaction
The intuition, feeling, and thoughts on products. These can expose the evaluation and ranking.
How to achieve usability
To realize usability, we need to stress UCD and 3 principals:
- To focus on user and user task as soon as possible.
- Evaluation and measure methods.
- Iterative design
There are many technologies to achieve usability, such as Human-machine engineering research, Participatory design, Focus group discussion, Research, Go through, Card sorts, Paper prototype, Expert evaluation, Usability, Tracking investigation. In practical operation, the most famous is Usability Testing.
Usability Testing Methods
Usability testing is a technology, to evaluate and test how easy for the participant(aimed user) using the product(e.g. website), it may be the early prototype and mid-term semi-finished products, or late product. Under normal circumstances, create a scene, ask the user to use this website and answer a series of questions, through observing and interviewing, we can easily find if users have problems in operating the website, and judge if the website is usable.
- Observing: operation, and say and express their decision-making process. At the same time, the observer and developer will watch and listen, and make notes aside. The initial place, the custom steps, the fluency degree, if have doubts, the change of body and facial expression.
- Interview: ask the user to describe the experience of the product, and problems encountered, and advice. Why do you operate it in this way? Where is the question? How do you feel the website in total? How to make it easier to use? and so on.
1 Expert Review
Invite a usability expert or human factors engineering expert who hasn’t known the project to check and review the system and product, whether remote form or onsite, the advantage of expert is they can finish and come out testing results quickly.
2 Paper Prototype Testing
Before coding has been down, use prototype by rough hand drawing and computer sketch to express interface, and observe user undertaking a task. This method is quick and easy, and at an extremely low cost.
3 Questionnaire
Generally, after users finish the tasks and let the user fill in questionnaire. Questionnaires are consist of Yes/No value, Preference degree, and Open questions, user can fill online or offline, organizer can do qualitative and quantitative data analysis.
4 Eye Tracking
Use eye tracking device to track the user eye moving, to test which parts of the website user pay attention to and how long it stays, thus can get the attention and preference of participants.
5 Controlled Experiment
In the lab environment, through comparing how the user operates two products, we can get the data and do further analysis. This method may be the most difficult, but it yields the most accurate and scientific result.
6 Automated Usability Evaluation
It is probably the holy grail of usability testing. The general steps are:
Step1: the user needs to key in the website name, URL and (optionally) the tagline of the website, then press evaluate;
Step2: The web server will fetch the website data and automatically upload and parses the HTML and CSS of the website;
Step3: The web server uses the library to communicate with the database to fetch the data stored in the guidelines and rule type tables;
Step4: The web server compares the data got from the library to evaluate the website;
Step5: The web server sends the information back to the USEFul website: so that the latter displays the results of the evaluation as shown below.
Involving User
In a word, product usability is very important to company and user. Usability is the most famous technology to achieve usability and is a part of UCD. It stresses that user takes part in the design process, and keep iterative and updating continuously. It may be not necessary for usability testing to use very complex and technical, but it is important to do it. Even though asking the colleague aside, you will benefit more or less once you do it.
References: 《Usability testing manual》、《An Introduction To Website Usability Testing》.
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