Usability testing, without a doubt, becomes even more effective when you plan thoughtfully. The concept of testing is gaining popularity in many domains and industries as businesses and brands incorporate a wide variety of usability testing tools such as Trymata to help produce or design user-friendly products.
Usability testing is one of the best ways to obtain feedback and insight from groups of targeted users. Moreover, proven technology can help brands measure product acceptance and validate features. From the UX design of live sites, apps, marketing materials, or even just prototypes and wireframes, you can be conducting usability testing on pretty much any digital product.
While usability testing has become more effective and a lot simpler to get started with, you still need to be savvy and have sufficient knowledge to implement it. Here is a usability testing checklist you can use to carry out and evaluate your user tests.
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The usability testing checklist
The checklist of guidelines below will help you to plan your usability testing study for maximum effectiveness and impact.
Define your study goals
You cannot get definite results without setting or defining proper goals. The same applies to usability testing. Whether you want to test a single feature or assess an entire application’s flow or GUI, you must have well-defined goals or objectives.
Identify the area of concern, interest, and purpose of your study. Defined goals can also help you determine the most suitable user testing methods. For instance, your goals may include finding the number of users who adopted a feature in a timeframe.
If your goals are a bit more general, such as impression testing or subtle design tweaks, the goals will remain much the same, just on a much smaller scope. For example, one of the things you learn from impression testing is brand appeal, which is what much of usability testing is about on a large scale.
Task script writing
If you have clearly defined goals, task writing will not be difficult. You need to consider objectives for each task. If you want to keep tasks open-ended, you will be able to assess the intangible effects of an application and web. You can refer to our pre-made user testing templates to start, or try out our AI-powered usability test script generator.
Also, it is important to counterbalance tasks to obtain a 360-degree view for product usability. Don’t force the user through your flow. Let them think and react to your tasks and how your design interacts with them.
Check out our tips on writing usability testing scripts or our scenario-specific instructional articles: writing tasks for competitive usability testing, ecommerce website testing, wireframe & prototype testing, and marketing asset testing.
Test the correct users
Testing the right demographics is a vital part of usability testing. That means if you use ERP novices to test complex enterprise software, you won’t get authentic results.
You must recruit representatives (the most suitable users) by assessing factors such as location, age, interests, and income. Remote user testing software is very effective in recruiting participants based on specific demographics.
Work with a manageable number of users
No matter how much experience you have in conducting usability testing, you may face distractions in the presence of tons of participants. That is why it is important to work with an ideal number of participants.
Using remote testing tools in this regard is a solution to the problem. You can easily watch users interacting with your design, and then use the quantitative data captured by something like our own UX Diagnostics suite to benchmark and guide your qualitative evaluation.
Consult our guide on determining the correct number of users for your usability test.
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Summing up
Overall, taking a purposeful approach is always useful for testing usability and is great to ensure the project’s integrity. The given usability testing checklist thus can help you improve the design of your UX, learn about your product/brand’s appeal and reputation, and drive impactful results.
And it started with a simple checklist.