Usability testing: How not to strangle your customers

Picture this: your website has a section for the charging plans for car rentals. The page looks awesome, the letters are bold and colorful; the buttons are functioning as they should. Yet, Customer retention is falling like Corona beer share value. And Poof!  your competitor has overtaken you. And your investors are shaky all of a sudden.

Scary, huh?  What if I told you there is simple test that could have saved you? A test which could have warned you about the visitors’ discomfort about the entire process. Perhaps, they are getting lost half way through their buying journey. Seeing varying rates when choosing the rentals and feeling suspicious. Maybe the wrong words are bold and the colors are causing them to shift to night mode. These and other such concerns are the focus of a class of testing call the usability testing.

The importance of usability is known and felt to those who are competing in the highly contested market. While it is expensive and time consuming even for other QA testing processes but people come to realize usability plays crucial role to attract or retain customers only too late. It’s surprising how much of the software world is largely unaware of this and does not make their clients aware of this important aspect.

This is a quick guide to approach the world of usability testing.

1. Consider the business of the project:

Usability is essential to every product. That being said in the out sourcing market usability makes more sense for some particular projects than others. For example: for client facing projects have crucial importance for usability testing while business to business products might want to explore the aspect at a later stage. The right people will benefit from integrating this test in even the pilot as first impression lasts longest.

2. Adapt the process to Sprints:

In the agile development process is fast and do not take any prisoners. Therefore the tests should be tied to the specific Sprints. It will also help to minimize and control the number of tests that need to be conducted. As the per the sprint goal the project manager can assign the tests. This will ensure that the development process is not hampered.

3.   Bake it into QA and UX:

Usability testing is a UXR tool that is used to determine the UX experience. It can be purely an UX task to help improve change and adapt the system. The task can be distributed to the QA team and involve UX team as audience. It can also be vice versa if the task is considered a QA task.

4. Clear deliverables:

There should be a clear deliverable for the test that should be made clear to the client. The test should result in providing a qualitative assessment of the application through a metric. The metric should contain clear scores which are understandable to you.  Also the tests should produce usability issues that should be tracked into the issue tracker. The issues should be streamlined into the sprints.

5. Scale according to budget:

Usability testing could be conducted remotely or on site. It could include 20 people in groups of five or surveys in field. According to the need of the project the companies should offer the plan to find out what is essential and how to acquire it. If the budget makes sense only the test is possible.

Usability testing done well can give you the edge just like performance testing. Be sure to consider it before plunging head first into the ocean of startups; make sure your life jackets have no holes in them! Here’s a stolen Dilbert to make you smile :)