What is usability testing?

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What Is
Usability Testing?

Definition of Usability
Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user
interfaces are to use.
The word "usability" also refers to methods for improving
ease-of-use (during the design process).

Importance of Usability
On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave.
If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people
leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave.
If a website's information is hard to read or doesn't answer users' key questions, they leave.
Note a pattern here?
There's no such thing as a user reading a website manual or otherwise spending much time trying to
figure out an interface.
There are plenty of other websites available; leaving is the first line of defense when users encounter a
difficulty.

Quality Components
1. Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the
design?
2. Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
3. Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they
reestablish proficiency?
4. Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they
recover from the errors?
5. Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?
6. Utility: Does it do what users need for it to be functional?

Usefulness
Definition of Utility
whether it provides the features you need.
Definition of Usability
how easy & pleasant these features are to use.
Definition of Useful = usability + utility.

How to Improve Usability
There are many methods for studying usability, but the most basic and useful is user testing, which has 3
components:
1. Get hold of some users, ideally representative of your target market, but any will do for initial
feedback.
2. Ask the users to perform representative tasks with the design or ask them to review the site and
record their feedback in real time.
3. Observe what the users do, where they succeed, and where they have difficulties with the user
interface. Shut up and let the users do the talking.

Initial Tests
It's important to test users individually and let them solve any problems on their
own.
If you help them or direct their attention to any particular part of the screen, you
have contaminated the test results.
To identify a design's most important usability problems, testing 5 users is typically
enough.
Rather than run a big, expensive study, it's a better use of resources to run many
small tests and revise the design between each one so you can fix the usability
flaws as you identify them.

Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5
users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
The number of usability problems found in a usability test with n users is:
N (1-(1- L ) n
)
where N is the total number of usability problems in the design and L is the proportion of usability problems discovered
while testing a single user. The typical value of L is 31%, averaged across a large number of projects we studied.
Plotting the curve for L =31% gives the following result:

Only Need to Test with 5 Users
The most striking truth of the curve is that zero users give zero insights.As soon as you collect data from a single test
user, your insights shoot up and you have already learned almost a third of all there is to know about the usability of the
design. The difference between zero and even a little bit of data is astounding.
When you test the second user, you will discover that this person does some of the same things as the first user, so there
is some overlap in what you learn. People are definitely different, so there will also be something new that the second user
does that you did not observe with the first user. So the second user adds some amount of new insight, but not nearly as
much as the first user did.
The third user will do many things that you already observed with the first user or with the second user and even some
things that you have already seen twice. Plus, of course, the third user will generate a small amount of new data, even if not
as much as the first and the second user did.
As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and
again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to
the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems. After the fifth user, you are wasting your time
by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.

Why Not Test With a Single User?
You might think that 15 studies with a single user would be even better than 3 studies with 5 users. The
curve does show that we learn much more from the first user than from any subsequent users, so why
keep going? Two reasons:
● There is always a risk of being misled by the spurious behavior of a single person who may perform
certain actions by accident or in an unrepresentative manner. Even 3 users are enough to get an
idea of the diversity in user behavior and insight into what's unique and what can be generalized.
● The cost-benefit analysis of user testing provides the optimal ratio around 3 or 5 users, depending
on the style of testing. There is always a fixed initial cost associated with planning and running a
study: it is better to depreciate this start-up cost across the findings from multiple users.

When To Test More Users
You need to test additional users when a website has several highly distinct groups of
users. The formula only holds for comparable users who will be using the site in fairly similar
ways.
If, for example, you have a site that will be used by both children and parents, then the two
groups of users will have sufficiently different behavior that it becomes necessary to test with
people from both groups. The same would be true for a system aimed at connecting
purchasing agents with sales staff.
Even when the groups of users are very different, there will still be great similarities between
the observations from the two groups. All the users are human, after all. Also, many of the
usability problems are related to the fundamental way people interact with the Web and the
influence from other sites on user behavior.

REFERENCE
Nielsen, Jakob, and Landauer, Thomas K.:
"A mathematical model of the finding of usability problems,"
Proceedings of ACM INTERCHI'93 Conference
(Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 24-29 April 1993), pp. 206-213.
https://www.nngroup.com

What is usability testing?

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