Improving Your Web Design with Usability Testing

In today’s fast-paced world of online development and design, creating user-friendly products and websites is crucial for your business’ success. However, how can you ensure that your website is truly user-friendly? Usability testing is the answer to that question!

Usability testing is an important step in the design process. It allows you to gather valuable insights from users and make more informed decisions. This guide will explore usability testing, its best practices, benefits, and how to conduct usability tests to improve your designs.

What is usability testing? 

Usability testing is a user-centered research method that evaluates a website’s usability by observing how users interact with it. It aims to find and address any usability issues and ensure that the final product meets the users’ expectations. Usability testing involves gathering participants’ feedback when they complete specific tasks, which provides designers with actionable insights for improvement.

Benefits of usability testing

Usability testing provides many advantages that significantly impact your website design, including:

• Look for user pain points: Usability testing can uncover areas of frustration or confusion within your design. This lets you address these pain points effectively.
• Improve user satisfaction: By listening to user feedback, you can change the design to ensure it increases user satisfaction and loyalty.
• Reduce development costs: Catching any usability issues during the early design phase can save you time and money by avoiding expensive redesigns and redevelopments.
• Improve conversion rates: Usability testing can optimize your website or app and improve user engagement and higher conversion rates.
• Competitive advantage: User-friendly designs usually outperform competitors, giving your business a competitive edge.

Now, let’s look at the key steps for conducting proper usability tests.

3 steps for effective usability testing for your website

You’ve likely run usability tests before, but any website owners will benefit from a standardized testing process. Below are our tried-and-tested processes you should follow when performing usability testing for your website:

1. Define your testing objectives

Usability tests always aim to validate how easy it is to navigate your website. However, when running these types of tests, you must identify more detailed goals – the data that may be quantitative or qualitative. These include:

• Time to complete specific tasks (quantitative)
• Abandonment rate (quantitative)
• The number of alternative paths (quantitative)
• Most clicked (quantitative)
• Answers regarding users’ pain points of frustration (qualitative)
• How easy it is for users to understand your website (qualitative)

2. Determine the testing methods

As part of your usability testing plan, you must choose the most suitable testing method for your needs after you clearly outline your goals. Every method will fall under these research types:

• Moderated or unmoderated: Choose whether the testing sessions will need a moderator. Some researchers may need a moderator to ask follow-up questions in real-time, while others prefer the freedom of unmoderated testing so participants won’t feel like they are being watched.
• Qualitative or quantitative: This refers to the answer type you’ll receive from the test. These may include sentiment-focused (quantitative) such as quotes or facial expressions from users. They may also be data-focused (quantitative), which consists of the number of clicks or the time it takes to perform a task.
• Remote or in-person: Remote website tests are common, as you can record the user’s screen and monitor their clicks. However, an in-person test is also possible if you have a product that requires it.

3. Choose a tool or location

The next step is choosing a usability testing tool suitable for your research and production team. To host moderated and remote usability testing sessions, you may need video conferencing apps like Zoom or Google Meet to record the sessions. Finally, if you are hosting the test in person, you should choose a relevant location depending on your needs and your participant’s location. 

3 Best practices for testing your website

Testing your live website usability is a best practice. However, there are other tips worth noting to get the most accurate insights from your tests.

1. Ensure to have realistic, easy-to-understand scenarios

Avoid any technical language in your test scenarios, and make it easy for your participants to understand your instructions. For example, instead of using words like “Use external authentication to create an account,” you can say, “Sign up with a Facebook or Twitter account.”

Also, make sure you’re requesting something that is actually possible. If you want them to sign up with their Facebook account, but they don’t use Facebook, you’ll frustrate them and limit your insights.

2. Test early 

There are many cases where a website with technical issues is launched, which invites many negative reviews, and the company must hold it back to relaunch it weeks or months later. This can cost the business several thousands of dollars in addition to losing users due to dissatisfaction.

Remember that you only know the cost of launching untested products or services once you risk it. In these cases, testing as early as possible and often is a great way to ensure you’ll be safe rather than sorry.

3. Use multiple testing methods

It’s best to try a mix of tests. Even though both quantitative and qualitative methods offer value, the best value combines the two. One data type usually offers context for the other. For example, ask questions to humanize your data and understand your audience’s thoughts or analyze test statistics to receive more complete qualitative feedback.

Final tips for usability testing 

You might believe that bypassing usability testing will save you time and money, but in reality, it’s the exact opposite. When you release features into production, it’s essential to identify any issues or inconsistencies as early as possible and address problems as they arise later. Consistently testing on a live site is the only way to guarantee that your website delivers optimal performance and provides a genuinely user-focused experience.

In the long run, skipping usability testing can lead to higher costs, as fixing overlooked issues after they’ve reached your users is often more time-consuming and expensive. Regular testing not only helps prevent these costly errors but also enhances customer satisfaction, ensuring that your site evolves seamlessly with your users’ needs.