Usability Testing is an incredibly important part of the design process as it allows designers to separate themselves from what they are designing and get genuine unbiased feedback on the work they do. Without Usability testing it’s nearly impossible to know whether your design will function well as you as the designer have too much understanding of the way systems work, so you can’t truly evaluate designs without bias. While I had been aware of the idea of usability testing, I suppose I never really considered just how vital they are until researching them for this blog entry. It’s maybe the most important step of the design process as it is evidence of the quality of your work and everything you have done. Going forward I definitely want to explore usability testing more as part of my own process as I can see how it would massively benefit my work.
User Testing: Why & How (Jakob Nielsen) (Video)
There are two types of data that Usability testing can offer, those being Quantitative data and Qualitative data. Quantitative data is data with a numerical value and usually helps to inform on the overall usability of systems, whereas qualitative data is information from how the user feels about aspects of the system and can be used to inform design decisions. It’s important to distinguish between both types and consider both types when evaluating a system. I think it’s really important for me to understand the difference between the two types and understand when each should be used. Quantitative should be used as hard factual evidence while qualitative gives more feeling-based evidence, which makes me think that qualitative data is probably the more important overall, as it’s more of the raw thought behind the quantitative data.
Quantitative vs. Qualitative Usability Testing
A really interesting idea I came across was how usability testing works when your users may be from different countries or cultures. It’s something I first encountered during my summer internship when I got to sit in on some usability testing for an international client. When interviewing American users, there were certain phrasings and conventions that didn’t translate to the Japanese users. While usability testing is really good at finding how usable a system is, it’s also a useful tool to see the international reach of a system. Doing this can help to find ways to make systems work internationally without having to have regional variations. This is something I’d definitely like to explore in future as it’s a really interesting concept to see how systems translate between regions.
International Usability Engineering: Article by Jakob Nielsen
Usability Testing is something I definitely want to explore more in the future, as I realise it’s importance to good design. I think we can often forget the idea that we aren’t our users, so taking time to remove ourselves from our work and find out what people really think about it is essential to producing effective design. Overall this was a good start to this topic and has set me up for something to investigate more next semester.