Engaging with the end-user through usability testing is so important to identify pain points, opportunities, and learning about the users. It helps in redesigning the UI/UX in an iterative fashion, and also helps collecting detailed data through quantitative analysis and testing with multiple countries, personas, and comparing competitive products. A product that’s rich in UI/UX need to have detailed usability testing. Let’s look at how Software Testing folks can get involved and add value while usability testing takes place.
Learning Directly From End-Users
Learning about the product is an ongoing process for Software Testers, and there’s no better opportunity to directly learn from the target audience. Things unspecified in the requirements are exposed during usability testing. The testers learn how the users navigate the product and how they use it for their use case. It helps in learning about any new or missed out personas. It helps in learning how to test the product as the users would use it.
Collecting Quantitative Data
While usability data is done, analytics data is collected which aspects of UI are important, how much they are used, etc., which helps in prioritizing testing. The data also helps in interaction of features and their UIs, which helps in integration testing as well as system/solution testing. The data is useful in incorporating validation and verification point checks in all stages of the product development where the data input/output through the user interfaces are used by the product (API/GUI/CLI).
Design Considerations
Listening to end-users during the usability testing helps the test team to identify the design considerations that are important for the product. It also helps prioritize the design considerations. Having different sets of end-users or personas expose the different design considerations of the product, so it would be helpful for the test team to come up with an effective test strategy for the product.
Task Definitions
Interactions of users with the product involves planned tasks and associated instructions for the user to perform those tasks. Having the test team involved in this phase helps in testers helping in coming up with accurate keywords in the instructions. Task keywords are so important in directing the users in the right way, otherwise they get confused and will not be able to navigate the product correctly. By the feedback mechanism provided by iterations of usage and design, testers also learn to come up with better task definitions and help the team in doing great task definitions.
I see a whole lot of value in test teams participating along with the developers in usability testing efforts. It helps everyone in learning and be better in identifying tests, risks, data, personas, and all the ways that the user would use the product, which can help in coming up with a great test strategy. It works out great when test team directly gets involved in usability testing sessions instead of developers collecting information and passing them on to the test team.
For detailed inputs on how test team can help in better usability testing, feel free to get in touch with me.