5 Must-Haves For Effective UX Testing

Usability Testing Methods

Whether you are going to launch a mobile app, a website or software, you will need to optimize your product as much as possible before going live. User experience testing gives you the ability to map the user persona (who the person is) and user journey (in what context they’ll use your product) and optimize your mobile app, website or software for your target audience.

Effective UX testing is critical and you shouldn’t skip it and go directly to the market. According to UX Planet’s survey, 22% of companies increased the frequency of usability testing. According to Forbes, usability testing and user experience testing review can help your business to grow and reach the next level thanks to improved customer experience. Let’s understand five must-haves for effective UX testing.

1. Understand what type of testing is required at what stage

There are multiple ways to gather insights on how real users will use your website or app. These ways are moderated usability testing, focus groups, beta testing, A/B testing and surveys. You need to understand which type of testing is suitable at what stage, what the requirements would be, and how you will benefit from it. One of the main decisions is whether you want to moderate the testing or not.

For example, moderated usability testing is recommended during the design phase to identify and fix potential issues of working prototype where the design isn’t fully developed. You can opt for focus groups when your product is about to complete, and you want to gather feedback from end-users.

2. Have an optimal user experience testing plan

Once you are clear about what type of testing is used at what stage, start making an optimal testing plan. The plan can be created along with the prototype development phase. Your test plan should define what aspects you are going to test, what parameters you will focus on and how you will capture the results.

Besides the overall plan, you should also be ready with a list of open-ended tasks users or testers will need to accomplish and which questions they will need to answer. This approach will be useful in identifying the most liked aspects of your product among users and removing common hindrances.

3.Have a user experience testing software for unmoderated tests

If you are going to launch a website, then it would be a great decision to have a user testing software for unmoderated tests. User experience software will provide you features such as cross-browser testing, testing for mobile and responsiveness, visitor segmentation and geo-targeting as well. It will allow you to gather insights on how users interact with your website and determine your user testing review.

Some tools may ask a set of questions or surveys while the user is browsing through the website. The insights from surveys will make you understand the problems of users and arrive on what improvements you should make to enhance the user journey even further.

4. Have documented and consolidated test results

Once you have performed all kinds of user experience testing activities, you will have data, results and reports from multiple different sources which will include answers of the questions you asked, details of usability sessions, surveys, reports, analytics data, test results, results from usability testing, reports from user experience testing software and a lot more. You will need to document everything in structured, meaningful and relevant ways so that you can actually make sense out of it and utilize it in the near future to make your product better.

5. Have actionable insights from your activities and results

The data you gather will showcase things you didn’t know about the behavior of your users, but you will need to translate the insights into a list of actions and changes. Once you have consolidated answers, details of usability sessions, surveys, reports, analytics data in one place; your next step would be to arrive on most important and most beneficial actions to be taken which will have the highest positive impact on your users.

User testing is a great way to know how your user base interacts with your product

The end goal of user experience testing is to find out how you can make your product better and easier to use for your existing and potential customers. To make remote user testing more effective, companies have also started using big data analytics for understanding customers. Use of data analytics techniques and insights from data helps to deliver better customer experience and improve product development.

Users of the mobile-first world should be delighted with great experience with during the entire customer journey. To make sure you are delivering them, right king of experience, avoid making common UX and CX mistakes. We hope that this article was useful for you to understand the must-have aspects of effective UX testing and will help you to streamline your usability testing process.

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