The joy of an early release lasts but a short time. The bitterness of an unusable system lasts for years.
Get an understanding of how your users will actually use your system. This calculative method of user testing can give you both quantitative and qualitative feedback on where users get frustrated the most, what you’re getting right, and what you’re doing wrong.
Benefits to usability testing: by watching real world situations, such as contextual inquiry, we can build scenarios to develop and test to—all while increasing the user’s confidence in your project.
Here are a few usability testing methods we employ:
- Cognitive walkthroughs
- Contextual inquiry
- Heuristic evaluation
- Field Testing
- Usability inspections
- A/B testing
Exercises like card sorting and cognitive walkthroughs help determine what is working and what isn’t—which can be the basis for introducing subtle changes throughout your system.
Generally, we’ll definite usability testing by creating scenarios and having your participants run through the scenarios.
While we know the requirements gathering phase is vital for a successful implementation that meets all business, functional, compliance and system requirements as well as meets or exceeds all expectations we also know that time is critical. It is because of our experience and specialty in this area that allows us to identify specific requirements quickly to prevent any delays and move changes to testing and implementation quickly.
We will also use the same dedication to collect new project requirements on website requests. All requirements will be documented, given a unique identifier and provide an input into workplans as well as the development and testing activities. Requirements will be clear and specific so not to be misinterpreted and they will be able to be traced through design/development and testing phases.
By gathering objective—constructive feedback, we can help eliminate risks and increase customer satisfaction based on the user’s performance while using your system. We can calculate important design decisions based on how long certain tasks take and how easy the system was for them to use.
To set up a usability testing session, we need participants to sign a waiver giving us permission to take notes or possibly record the scenario. It’s important that questions are non-leading and the scenarios accurately portray what it would take to complete certain tasks. We observe and document to help make recommendations to improve design.
