All You Need to Know About Software Usability Testing

In the current world, there is a huge demand for new applications and software, because they help in bringing ease to the life of its users and provide some services that are very useful to them. But what will happen if software developed after months of hard work, is not usable by the end user? There is no use of software that cannot be operated by the user, conveniently, or if a user finds it hard to understand the application. 

Nowadays, enterprises want to develop software solutions that can be used by as many users as possible, even users with some disabilities. So it becomes very necessary to test the usability of software before the final product is ready to go live and Software Usability Testing is one of the ways of doing it.

What is Software Usability Testing?

The concept of software usability testing can be understood from these aspects: 

Purpose: Usability testing determines how easy it is for users to interact with an application and whether it serves its intended purpose.

Real User Feedback: This testing is carried out by real users to gather feedback on whether the application meets the needs and expectations of the users.

Feature Usability: Software is considered usable if users can effectively use all of its features.

User Satisfaction: Usability testing enables developers to assess user satisfaction and make changes based on feedback.

Focus Areas: It prioritizes understandability, clear language, and user experience to improve software quality.

Evaluation Criteria: Usability testing evaluates the application's usefulness, findability, accessibility, usability, and desirability.

Benefits of Software Usability Testing

Below are the benefits of software usability testing:

1. Usability testing service gives an idea about ‘how a user will be able to perform a particular action successfully.

2. It also helps in recognizing the areas in the software that need correction for a better end-user experience.

3. It also gives information on the time taken by the application to perform a certain task.

4. A major advantage of usability testing is that it tells the team ‘ whether the end-user is satisfied with the product or not?’, based on their feedback.

5. End-user satisfaction also provides opportunities to improve the business.

6. Even it also helps in resolving the internal issues within the team. Sometimes the team members are not able to be convinced of a particular idea and usability testing passes the decision to the end-users. Because ultimately the product is being developed for them and nobody knows better than them than what they need.

7. Issues in the software are exposed before the product is released to the market.

Need for Software Usability Testing

1. An application is developed to be used by users and it is necessary to ensure that all the users can use the software conveniently.

2. It also helps in identifying the changes in the user’s behavior.

3. It also prevents the wastage of time and efforts of the team by discovering the defects in the design and development at the earlier stage of software development, so that corrective measures can be taken.

Criteria to Evaluate the Usability of an Application

1. An application is considered to have better usability if the user can easily understand and learn ‘how to use it?’.

2. A usable application should be easy to access for the end-users.

3. The language used in the product should be easy to understand for users of all types, so that everyone can use the software, from a user with average vocabulary to a user with very good vocabulary.

4. The look of the software should be attractive and it should motivate the user to operate it.

5. Messages should be displayed at various places to guide the user in performing the desired task.

6. Along with that, a usable application tells the user when something wrong has been done by the user through error messages.

How to Perform Usability Testing?

1. Most of the users like all the features that are important or used frequently by them to be present right in front of them, so it is a good practice to place these features on the left bar or the top navigation bar.

2. A user might feel frustrated after performing the same set of actions again and again to perform a task that has to be accessed very frequently. So it’s better if the users can access important features just after one or two clicks.

3. It should also be checked that the User Interface of the software complies with the GUI testing standards set by the operating systems. Ignorance of this may lead to inconsistency or improper behavior of application for users accessing it on different platforms like UI elements are not visible on the screen the way they should.

4. All the elements like text fields, text areas, buttons, drop-down lists, and popups should be displayed as per these standards.

5. It should also be checked that ‘whether the user can navigate between pages easily or not?’.

Software User Testing Services

User testing services for software can be of two types:

1. The usability testing can be performed by qualified test engineers who possess enough domain knowledge and experience to understand ‘how the software will be used by the end-users?’ and find out the usability issues in the software.

2. The usability testing is also performed by the end-user. It is done by giving them an ordinary task to perform on the application.

Conclusion

Software Usability testing allows the development team to find out the issues in the software that can impact its usability and productivity. The issues discovered can be resolved by the development team so that the final product is ready to provide a seamless user experience.

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