Importance of Usability Testing in Website Designing

Testing before the actual launch of the product is indeed very important. Testing, if properly carried out ensures the success of the product to much extent.

What is Usability testing:

 It is a technique of evaluating the product features and its functionality by testing it on the users. The products which can be highly benefited from the usability testing can be the food or consumer products or websites and other web applications. As they allow the instant response from the users and the required changes or modifications can be done in less time.

Generally we spend so much of time in testing the website design after it is completely finished working on. Our objective is to provide error free and amazing experience to our users. The few things which you check for sure is cross browser compatibility, navigation functionality, proper functioning of call to action buttons and submissions of forms, queries, comments etc. The testing becomes even more indispensable for e-commerce websites.

Goals for Usability Testing

There are some goals which we keep in the mind while conducting usability testing.

a) Performance: How much time or steps taken up to perform the basic task like creating up the account or order something etc.

b) Memorability: If the users come back to a website after a certain period time of not using it, so does he finds everything easy to do or he has to start all over again to proceed through.

c) Mistakes: To know how many mistakes a user commits and how does he recover from it.

d) User Satisfaction and Interaction: To know where user interacted with the website. What is his satisfaction level or user experience? Did he enjoy visiting the site? Did he get what he was actual looking for? Did the web design make him to perform the task for which the website was supposed to be built up?

Market Research is not Usability testing

Simply gathering of opinions and ideas on a product is not usability testing rather it is a market research. Usability testing has a wider scope than it. It involves close observation when a user is working on the website while under controlled conditions in order to understand how well the user could handle the product and what are the outcomes of that.

Usability Testing at different Stages

1. Pre Development – Users can help even before the prototype is made. But then they can only give directions and they may not able to comprehend the site
2. During Development -  Users can well identify problem areas and can save time and efforts of design and development team
3. Post Development - The main role of users come in this stage where they actually comprehend well with the finished product.

See if you thinking that after the launch of website, when you will be receiving user feedback, then you will make changes or modifications in your website. Then my friend, you are completely wrong. Users once having poor experience with your website are never going to return back.  Now it is the time to be proactive.