A visually appealing website design and a pleasant user experience are critical components of a website’s success. These are some of the most crucial factors in increasing the trust and conversion rate of your website.
Most visitors visit your website to meet certain goals/to perform certain actions, such as ordering a ticket or obtaining specific information. If your website is unable to meet those demands swiftly and simply, potential clients will go on to another website.
When it comes to eCommerce websites, a bad user experience may drive nearly 90% of online buyers away. So it is very essential for Website owners to undertake usability testing to guarantee that users have an effective and happy experience.
How can you know whether your website provides an amazing & flawless user experience? How can you tell whether you’ve overlooked anything crucial for your users?
This is where usability testing for websites comes in.
What is Usability Testing?
Usability testing is an excellent method for validating your concept, website functioning, and design. It provides insights into how potential customers may interact with your website and may also reveal any other issues with your website so you can remedy them.
Benefits of conducting Usability Testing
– It identifies the moment of disconnect between the website and the user. For example, we can able to track that at which point of the sales/conversion funnel the website visitor is dropping off.
– Before the website goes live, your design and development team may use usability testing to uncover problems and feature upgrades. It might spare you from making some costly mistakes!
– Interacting with a representative group of individuals can assist you in validating your concept and product. You can tell if your website is working properly by watching how people interact with it.
– You may use usability testing to determine how pleased your potential consumers are with your website or product, how easy the site is to browse, and whether there is room for improvement before making it live.
– If you want to provide your consumers a flawless & wonderful experience on your website, who is better than genuine people who can tell you about their experience?
Usability testing provides you with first-hand feedback on how your target audience reacts to your website. So in this article, we are going to explore the step-by-step guide on conducting Usability testing for your website.
Steps to conduct Usability Testing for your Website
1. Plan your Session/Test (Set Objective)
2. Identify the Best Method
3. Recruit the participants
4. Conduct the Test
5. Analyze and present the final data
6. Rinse and Repeat
1. Plan your Session/Test:
As a beginning point, you should explicitly describe what you hope to accomplish through usability testing and what information you hope to collect.
For example, if you want to know if consumers can successfully purchase a ticket, you must test the entire process, from browsing the main page to complete the single transaction.
In some ways, planning the specific goals of the usability testing session is the most important element of the entire process. The choices you make at the beginning of the testing procedure will determine how you progress and the results you get.
Determine the scope & Objective of your research: Specify the problems/areas you wish to research & concentrate on: what is the usability testing’s purpose? Which sections of your buysiness/E-commerce website would benefit the most from usability testing?
Users to test: Typically, these are indicative of your user personas, although you may wish to focus more particularly on a certain sector (e.g., users who have completed a purchase in the past 30 days).
We also advise only running one test at a time. It assists you in defining a SMART objective and focusing on testing a certain component of the website.
2. Identify the Best Method
Determine which usability testing approach is best after you’ve determined the test’s purpose. Consider the resources you have available to conduct a website usability test.
In-house testing is the way to go if you need to execute a very controlled test. However, keep in mind that it will require additional resources.
If, on the other hand, you want to get more findings in less time, unmoderated or moderated remote testing will suffice.
3. Recruit the participants
Each usability testing session should include five to seven people. If you utilize third-party services, it is easier to administer and less expensive. However, the number of participants necessary will be determined by the phases of development and the technique of testing.
For the early stages, you can employ the Guerilla approach, in which you pick participants at random to test your website.
You don’t need to research the ideal user first with this strategy because you’re looking to verify the prototype and obtain insights into the participants’ expectations. This test may also accommodate up to 12 participants in a single session.
In contrast, in a later stage of development, you must obtain more relevant outcomes. This necessitates collecting participants that are similar to your user persona – attributes that mirror genuine users, such as characteristics, desires, goals, and motivations.
4. Conduct the Test
Despite the fact that usability testing is mostly observational, effectively moderating tests is critical to obtaining high-level useful insights. In moderated tests, a number strategies are utilised (see below), each having advantages and disadvantages.
Here are various strategies at a glance, along with their benefits and drawbacks, as displayed on usability.gov:
Pros of Concurrent Think Aloud (CTA):
Understand participants’ ideas as they arise and as they seek to solve problems.
Obtain immediate feedback and emotional responses.
Cons:
Can disrupt usability metrics such as accuracy and time on task.
Pros of Retrospective Think Aloud (RTA):
It has no effect on usability metrics.
Cons:
The overall session length lengthens.
Difficulty recalling ideas from up to an hour ago Implies bad data.
Concurrent probing.
It is critical to record the audio as well as the test screen of these tests so that the moderator may review the recordings after the tests are completed to discover any missed insights.
The same ideas and approaches apply to remote moderated usability testing, and technology has made it extremely simple to record Remote Desktop usability tests.
Remote usability testing for mobile is more difficult owing to a lack of recording technologies available, although there are always innovative solutions. The Mailchimp team discussed how they used innovative camera utilisation to overcome the barrier of real-time mobile screen sharing.
5. Analyze and present the final data:
After the usability test is completed, the findings must be analysed. There is no single way to analyse your data. It is entirely up to you, as the researcher, how you want to visualise it. You may summarise and rectify the issues that users experience when navigating, or you can categorise them based on certain common characteristics.
You can address them or work chronologically, depending on the seriousness of the issue. You can use basic spreadsheets or specialised tools to determine the next steps in correcting or improving your website’s user experience. It’s all up to you.
You can adjust the speed and look of your website based on the information you collect.
6. Rinse and Repeat:
Usability testing is not something that should be done only once. The initial test result may involve various factors, such as the time of day and even the participants’ attitude.
Performing many test iterations with various participants will improve the accuracy and precision of the data.
You may replicate the testing environment, which includes your test, the testing room, and even the script you use to manage the testing environment.
Conclusion:
By following the above said process we can able to conduct usability testing for any website and do necessary changes to make it more successful. So please consider spending a little amount to invest in Usertesting. Cheers!
