VietMX Staff asked 3 years ago
The 9 Phases of a Usability Study:
- Decide which part of your product or website you want to test.Do you have any pressing questions about how your users will interact with certain parts of your design, like a particular interaction or workflow?
- Pick your study’s tasks.Your participants’ tasks should be your user’s most common goals when they interact with your product or website, like making a purchase.
- Set a standard for success.Once you know what to test and how to test it, make sure to set clear criteria to determine success for each task.
- Write a study plan and script.At the beginning of your script, you should include the purpose of the study, if you’ll be recording, some background on the product or website, questions to learn about the participants’ current knowledge of the product or website, and, finally, their tasks.
- Delegate roles.During your usability study, the moderator has to remain neutral, carefully guiding the participants through the tasks while strictly following the script.
- Find your participants.Screening and recruiting the right participants is the hardest part of usability testing. Most usability experts suggest you should only test five participants during each study, but your participants should also closely resemble your actual user base.
- Conduct the study.During the actual study, you should ask your participants to complete one task at a time, without your help or guidance. If the participant asks you how to do something, don’t say anything. You want to see how long it takes users to figure out your interface.
- Analyze your data.Analyzing it will help you discover patterns of problems, gauge the severity of each usability issue, and provide design recommendations to the engineering team.
- Report your findings.After extracting insights from your data, report the main takeaways and lay out the next steps for improving your product or website’s design and the enhancements you expect to see during the next round of testing.
