In the modern online economy, mobile has become just as important – if not moreso – than the traditional desktop experience.
As a consequence, it’s crucial for businesses with an online presence to provide seamless, user-friendly experiences across all device types. Anyone who doesn’t may fail to capitalize on major web traffic segments, and ultimately lose out on customers.
The demands placed on mobile websites and apps are unique: screen “real estate” is extremely limited, navigation relies on gestures instead of mouse clicks, and users’ concerns and objectives can be totally different.
How do you ensure that your users’ mobile experience is up to these specific challenges, and meets your users’ needs?
Trymata mobile user testing
Our usability testing suite at Trymata provides solutions for testing your digital products on all kinds of devices – including Android & iOS mobile devices.
Trymata’s mobile user testing feature makes it easy to…
- See how users are experiencing your application from their phone or tablet
- Hear actionable, specific tips and insights from users in your target demographic
- Maximize your app’s retention rate with intuitive, user-friendly design
A testing solution built for mobile
Our platform provides mobile user testing the way it was always meant to be: lightweight and flexible, fully contained by native mobile technologies. There’s no external camera or other hardware, and the only visible software during the test is our little green “UI” bubble.
The end result is a genuine, unencumbered mobile experience, captured in high quality video and complete with every user gesture. Taps, swipes, pinches, and any screen interaction is shown with precise detail in the video results.
Mobile user testing works just like desktop testing with Trymata: just set up your test, pick the device type, and get your results back in a matter of hours.
Sign up for a free trial & collect your first mobile user test results today!
How it works: The Trymata mobile tester apps
Our panel testers record their mobile experiences using the Trymata tester apps for Android & iOS – our answer to the challenges of mobile user testing.
Many efforts have been made to adapt user testing methods to mobile interfaces. Often, they have relied on external cameras, a solution that is costly as well as logistically complex, and is easily foiled by screen smudges or hands that get in the way.
We knew that a proper mobile solution would necessarily rely on screen capture, but on mobile devices, screen capture without taps and swipes is as useless as desktop video without the cursor. Gestures are the backbone of the mobile user experience.
That’s why we built an app that would capture not just the screen, but the interactions between the user and their device as well.
Taps, swipes, pinches, and all other finger-to-screen contact are recorded through the tester app, and cleanly overlaid onto your user videos. These gestures are as much a part of the mobile user experience as what’s on the screen.
Android testing: The “UI” bubble
Our other concern was to replicate as closely as possible a realistic, genuine user experience. We peeled away all the extra layers, and replaced them with a little green bubble that floats at the edge of the screen.
Testers can tap in to view the current task, then tap out to get right back to the test website or app. The bubble is non-intrusive, flexible, and floats right over top of the browser or native app interface.
iPhone testing: Toggle for tasks
Since screen overlays are not permitted on iOS devices, our solution for iPhone testing works a little different. Throughout the test, a thin red bar shows along the top of the phone screen – just like when making a screen recording with the iPhone’s native tech.
Testers can tap the red bar to toggle back and forth between the test website or app and the current task.
Read more: Writing user testing task scripts for mobile & desktop experiences
What can I test on mobile with Trymata?
You can test any kind of digital interface on both Android and iOS with Trymata’s user testing software! When creating your test with our simple 4-step setup flow, mix and match between our device options and our interface type options.
Mobile website testing
Test your live or beta website on any OS. On Android, users view the website in their phone’s default browser; on iPhone, your website is displayed within a Webview browser built into the Trymata app. You’ll be able to see exactly how they experience your mobile website from start to finish.
Mobile prototype testing
Get feedback on your mobile prototypes by setting up a test with your prototype’s share link. Trymata user testing is compatible with all major prototyping platforms, including InVision, AdobeXD, Balsamiq, and more.
Make sure that your prototype’s sharing settings allow anyone with the link to view it; or, if you prefer, you can leave it password-protected and provide the password to testers at the beginning of your test script.
Live mobile app testing
See and hear what users think of your live mobile app – just paste the App Store or Play Store link in when creating your test. We’ll have the testers download the app at the beginning of their sessions, and you’ll be able to watch and see how they interact with it and what they think of it.
Read more: User testing for mobile apps
Unreleased mobile app testing
If your app isn’t available for public download yet, you can upload an IPA or APK file to Trymata and our users will test it out. After they’ve recorded their test session, we auto-corrupt the file so they can’t keep accessing it.
You can also get feedback on unreleased mobile apps by using beta testing tools such as Testflight. If you have a Testflight beta app you want UX feedback on, you can get step-by-step instructions for testing it with Trymata here.
Why user testing?
It works! User testing is cost-effective to perform and, when you do it early and often, it can save you months of web development effort and thousands of dollars in expenses.
No matter how good your designers and developers are, they usually aren’t the target audience of your product, and they’re always too close to the product to see it through objective eyes. The only way to make sure that your real-life users will have a positive experience on your website or app is to put it in front of them and see what happens! User testing allows you to do that before releasing a finished product.
It takes only 5 users to uncover 80% of high-level usability problems on your website, according to Jakob Nielsen, the author of Usability Engineering.
So why wait? Start making your product more usable today with Trymata usability testing!
Get started with 5 free user test results below: