Best Practices for Usability Testing In UX Design

The success and failure of any software depends on its usability, accessibility and responsiveness as felt by its end users or customers. It is observed that designers don’t always take into account the ‘user experience’ while designing a product, for they are mainly guided by its objective as specified by the company. When such a product goes into the market without proper evaluation of its user experience, the inherent issues from the perspective of end users turn it into a non starter. To avoid such a scenario, usability testing is needed to be carried out prior to a product’s release into the market. Post this testing, any lingering issues related to the user interface and overall responsiveness of the product gets addressed. However, usability testing methods should be robust enough to identify the real issues. 

A lot of thought goes into designing a product. After the designing phase the product goes into development phase, where individual components or units are developed and tested for desired outcomes. However, more often than not the product is only checked from the perspective of developers and not the end users. In such a case, even though the product or application comes out looking fabulous, it might possess inherent flaws such as a poor user interface, lack of accessibility, delay in loading, slow scrolling, an unimaginative layout, erroneous content, etc. These flaws when faced by the end users end up as poor user experience. As there are many competitors of the product in the market, end users will not think twice before latching onto some other. This not only reduces the viability of the product, but also dents the brand image of the company producing it. 

To avoid getting into such a situation in the first place, companies need to perform usability testing in UX design for the product or application. Usability testing involves testing of the product by its end users or customers. While testing, the behaviour of users using the product is keenly observed by testers and key areas where some difficulties are faced get noted down. The areas of concern are addressed later before releasing the product into the market thus increasing its market viability.

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