When it comes to sales, ‘Always be closing’ is the ultimate lesson. In the digital world, however, the mantra is ‘Always be testing’.
Understanding Usability Testing
Usability testing, as the name suggests, refers to measuring how easy it is for a user to use a particular digital product, such as a website or a mobile phone app, and then making changes to enhance user’s experience. To understand usability testing, it is helpful to first learn about its components. Here are 5 of its components explained:
Learnability
Whatever it is that your digital product is designed to achieve, it should be easily understandable by the user. The user must easily be able to accomplish the tasks that he/she was supposed to.
Efficiency
The product should not just help users accomplish tasks; it should help them do them quickly.
Memorability
The user must easily remember how to use the product after he/she returns to it, that is, he/she should not have to start over.
Error-Recovery
It also requires you testing the errors that users make and how easily they recover from these errors.
Satisfaction
Finally, usability testing would want to test whether the user was happy after using the product.
Usability First – Why It Is More Important than All Other Factors
In the digital world, the user and the way he/she feels about your product is of utmost importance – after all, you have designed your product for them.
Let’s take an example. You have designed a website. It’s got all the aesthetic details, beautifully designed, pleasing to the eye and so on. However, it is just got this one basic flaw. Its navigation is weak and does not take the user to the page they desire. This means, that despite all the lavish designs you incorporated into your website, the user does not return to you and hence, the entire purpose gets killed.
When to Test and How
After you have launched a digital product, you should always be testing. This is because the digital world is constantly evolving and it is always helpful to know how the user is behaving. You can set up a schedule and have your IT department carry out usability testing.
The first time that the usability testing is carried out is at the very beginning. A beta version of the product is created and distributed among a select group of users. After they have tested the product for a few days, they provide their feedback and based on that, changes are made to the product before the final launch.
We at Lean Security are experts in security testing. Understanding the role of security in enhancing the overall user-experience, our team provides security testing for all kinds of digital products. From mobile application security testing to website security testing, we have got many security solutions for businesses.