Hello friends! In this post, we will be learning about – Usability testing. We will check its attributes, advantages, and some of the popular usability testing tools.
As the name suggests, it is a type of testing that deals with measuring the usability of the application. It is very critical to the application’s success. As it measures the ease with which a user can accomplish a task. Which in turn directly relates to the revenue and other business goals.
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Usability Testing Definition
Usability testing is a type of non-functional testing that determines the degree to which an application can be easily used and operated. It can be performed by the internal team or a small set of end-users. These users explore the different functionalities of the application and share the usability defects.
Attributes of Usability Testing
- Ease of use – To check how easily a user can use the different functionalities of the application.
- Ease of learning – To check how easily users can learn to use the application.
- Memorability – To check how easily the user can remember the different flows of the application after exploring it for the first time.
- Error rate – While using the application, how often do users make mistakes and how easily can they recover from those errors?
- Level of satisfaction – This a subjective attribute that deals with the satisfaction or the general opinion user has about the product.
Advantages of Usability Testing
- In Usability testing, the development team gets direct feedback from the potential user. This helps in creating a product that meets the user’s expectations.
- Increased user satisfaction with the product leads to a meeting of business goals.
- Issues are identified before the actual release of the product, this maximizes the chances of the product’s success.
- Well-conducted usability testing helps in minimizing the overall project cost. This is because usability bugs found after the actual release lead to a higher cost of bug fixing.
Usability Testing Tools
Let’s take a look at some of the most widely used free and paid usability testing tools. Most of these tools provide features like heatmap, analytics, A/B testing platform, etc. These features will, in turn, help you in making informed decisions to improve user experience and other usability attributes.
Hotjar
The two most important features of Hotjar are its Heatmaps and user session recordings. The Heatmaps aggregate the user’s clicks, mouse movements, and scrolling. With Recordings, you can actually see the complete recording of how users interact with your website.
They have both paid and free plans. The free plan comes with limited data at 2000 page views per day and is available forever.
Optimizely
Optimizely helps in usability testing by providing a wide range of features. These include – A/B testing, cross-browser testing, geo-targeting, mobile web testing, visitor segmentation, and multivariate testing.
They have both free as well as paid plans. It is used by top companies like – Microsoft, Alaska, eBay, GAP, IBM, etc.
Qualaroo
Qualaroo provides a user feedback system that asks users targeted questions in real time. These questions are personalized to each user and the follow-up questions are also based on the response to the previous questions.
The tool is a little costly compared to other alternatives. But its intelligent survey prompts system and AI-powered analytics and reporting make it worth the price.
Crazyegg
Crazyegg provides Heatmap, Scrollmap, and Overlay features that provide user clicks, scrolls, and web element clicks respectively. Along with that, it provides the ‘Confetti’ feature. Confetti can be considered similar to Google Analytics like visitor sources, search terms, etc.
It comes with a 30-day free trial and after that, it costs 9 USD per month.
Usabilla
Usabilla provides usability solutions for both websites and Apps. It provides features like Heatmaps, exit surveys, features, targeted feedback forms, etc. Some of the popular clients of Usabilla are Lufthansa, Philips, HP, Vodafone, etc.
It comes with a free 14-day trial and after that, their paid plan starts at $49 per month.
This completes our tutorial on Usability testing, its attributes, advantages, and some of the popular usability testing tools. If you have questions, do let us know in the comments.