In this article, we will see about Usability Testing and how it will performed and significance of it.
Firstly , What exactly is Usability Testing?
Testing the user friendliness of an application is called Usability testing.
Let us start with an example such that we have two applications A & B which are different but doing the same job. In this, we see which one is user friendly.
Given below are some of the parameters
we look into for testing. In this most of them are not measurable,
ü
Speed
ü
Help
ü
Navigation
should be simple
ü
Compatibility
ü
Look
& feel
ü
Features
ü
Location
of components
One important parameter other than the
above said parameters is “Effort needed
to learn the application”.
Suppose in the example, we understand
the software A in 2 hrs, but we take 4hrs to understand B. Let us see different
cases here,
®
since
we understand A in 2hrs, it becomes user friendly compared to B
® suppose
look & feel is not good for A.
In this case though, we understand A in 2hrs, we cannot say that A is user
friendly.
®
Therefore,
we look into many parameters before we say user friendliness of a software
The application should be such that it
should be pleasant looking [ suppose if we have red color text in yellow
background, definitely we don’t feel like using it ] and make a feel to the
end-user to use it.
Let us now see an example of Usability testing:
1) Consider some of the
examples below,
In this example, we see the Inbox –
the most frequently used feature is not kept in the right place.
End – users therefore search for the
Inbox & after sometime, they find the Inbox lying somewhere down.
This type of application may lose the
customers because they are less user – friendly.
How to
overcome this,
See to it that the important features
are placed in the left navigation
bar and top navigation bar (This is
normally followed)
Then we should see whether frequently
used features are easily accessible (like Inbox, Compose Mail etc)
While testing, we therefore have to
list all the important features before we start testing an application.
2) Consider the sketch shown below,
The
end – user to draw the above sketch every time, he clicks Tools -> Draw -> Line for each line and finally he clicks Tools -> Draw -> Line to complete
the sketch.
In
this , we see the end-user wants to draw a simple sketch, but he wastes his
time in clicking each time the Tools
-> Draw -> Line for the sketch. This becomes a waste of time for the
end-user.
Therefore,
while testing , we must make user friendly of the application by creating Tool bar which makes the job simple by
clicking on the necessary tools instead of going & clicking each time Tool -> Draw -> Line
How to
conduct Usability testing? (OR) What process will follow to do Usability
testing?
Prepare OR derive checklist (i.e, what
are the points to be checked). If we don’t prepare a checklist, we may miss
some features in the application.
For Usability testing, we should
prepare a genuine checklist specific to the product we develop.
Example of a checklist for an application,
ü
For
this application, one of the checklists includes color of already checked link
should be changed to red
ü
All
the images should have alt
tag(Tooltip)
ü
All
the pages should have link to Homepage
ü
Login
feature should have Forgot Password
link
Like the above checklist, we can derive as many checklists as possible based on the application (or) product. While deriving checklist, we should derive a common checklist which can be executed for all pages.
Hope the article helped you to understand about Usability Testing.
Thanks for reading my Blog,
Hope you liked it.
Happy Testing!!!!
