Usability Testing

Have you ever tried to purchase a product online, only to get lost in a maze of buttons and checkout forms? If you’re anything like most people, you’ve abandoned your fair share of shopping carts due to these all-too-common inconveniences.

Considering the number of lost sales from this recurrent issue, why would any business knowingly publish a poorly designed e-commerce website?

This happens when businesses hastily launch products, assuming that customers will figure everything out on their own. In reality, end-users rarely find a product as intuitive as its designers and developers do. After all, they are the ones who built the product – while consumers lack this same level of experience. With this in mind, how can we ensure products are inherently user-friendly for their intended audience? The tried and true solution is to conduct usability tests.

Usability testing is a research methodology for evaluating products or services by testing them on real users. By learning about the target users’ behavior and preferences, a usability test aims to identify problems in product design and uncover opportunities for improvement. This usually means observing how easily users can accomplish certain tasks when interacting with an app, website, or software. 

Let’s return to our e-commerce checkout scenario as an example. A usability test might explore how easily people can navigate the checkout process on mobile devices. Perhaps this test reveals that mobile users make many errors when entering their information into form fields, requiring that they go back and fix typos before completing their purchases—a process that can be incredibly tedious when typing on small mobile screens. Simply reducing the number of form fields and implementing autofill features could make the checkout process easier, preventing many mobile users from abandoning their carts.

Without usability testing, designers risk launching products that frustrate users, leading to poor engagement, increased support costs, negative brand perception, and lost revenue overall. User testing helps designers debunk their own assumptions and instead get to the bottom of what users actually need.