Usability testing is an evaluation strategy that allows you to collect information directly from your users by asking them to complete a series of tasks and provide you feedback on your product, concept, or website. While holding any kind of usability test will provide you valuable information about what about your design is working and what is not, these 6 tools offer a variety of features that will help you take your next usability test up a notch.
These tools:
Usability Hub’s Five Second Test is designed to help you understand visitors’ first impressions of your digital project. It displays your content to test participants for-- you guessed it-- five seconds, and then your visitors are asked a variety of questions about what they remember to help you gauge what elements of your project are the most striking.
Usability testing requires a lot of legwork before your test even goes live-- you’ve got to pinpoint what you want to find out, draft questions, and make sure that your whole team stays on the same page throughout the process. By creating a place for you to share designs and assign tasks, Trello makes managing your usability testing easy, allowing you to focus on making your test the best that it can be.
In addition to being the bread and butter of site evaluation, analytics are essential to any usability test for digital projects because they allow you to collect quantitative data about your test participants’ behaviors. Mixpanel can help you keep track of how visitors are navigating through your site to get insights about their behavior quickly.
If you want to reap the benefits of usability testing-- and who doesn’t?-- but don’t quite know where to begin, Zurb Studios is a great place to start. Using their progressive design system, they will pinpoint the key elements of your specific website’s analytics that you should be focusing on to help you start surfacing insights as soon as possible.
One of the trickiest aspects of usability testing is recruiting participants. It can be a real challenge to find participants that are representative of your users and to coordinate usability tests with all of them. Optimal Workshop makes that process quick and painless by helping you select participants for either remote or in-person testing from their pool of more than 10 million participants around the globe. If you were concerned about having too narrow of a sample pool, there’s no reason to be anymore!
If you needed to revise the manuscript for a book, you probably wouldn’t ask a dentist for help. Even if it’s a book for dentists. Seeking out an expert opinion will help you stay on track to accomplish what you set out to accomplish. Outsprung can distribute the digital project you’re testing to experts and provide you with video feedback, allowing you to supplement your user’s opinions with an expert opinion and ultimately collect more complete information.
Usability testing is a lot of work. Keep these tools in mind next time you think about delving into an evaluation project, and the whole process will be easier and more efficient.
