Top 5 website usability testing best practices

The overall customer service experience is what many businesses are now looking at when it comes to delivering or selling their goods or products and services. Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick Delisi’s book Effortless Experience explains that customer loyalty is what could really help boost a business.

Customer loyalty could be driven by how well a company delivers its basic promises and solves problems. Spectacular service isn’t really necessary. There’s no need for the customers to be wowed. What they really want is effortless experience.

This is where product testing and usability comes in. With today’s technology, most consumers are now making their purchases online. The decisions they make to purchase anything are now also based on how easy it is to get what they need.

Convenience is what most customers are after and this is also what helps the e-commerce industry boom. Now, a lot of businesses online now have their own websites and it’s now common for customers to check online shops or e-commerce platforms like mercato.com for the products that they need.

When it comes to websites, usability testing is essential as this is how you learn more about your users’ needs. The goal of website usability testing is to let the website owner and programmers know how easy it is to use the website in the perspective of the users themselves.

User Experience (UX) testers have many ways to execute website usability testing. Techniques have improved over the years and usually, the tests or studies they run are based on the process of lab studies.

Here are the best five website usability testing practices that you can apply when you run your own tests. These could help you and your team produce the best results so that you know what you can improve on.

Moderated Usability Testing

This is typically what professionals are practicing. This allows them to get feedback from live users or participants that they hired. The test is facilitated by giving the participants tasks that they have to accomplish on the website.

They could be questioned or asked to answer questions during, right after or after all tasks are accomplished. The point of doing this is to see how users react and use the website live. This makes the testers have a glimpse of how real users go through the website with a specific task in mind.

An example of this is asking the participants to log-in on the website if they need to prepare dinner in just an hour. You can observe how they do this while they are speaking their thoughts out loud.

It’s best to use this method during the design phase of the website. This is when the site is not yet fully developed. Some testers would also use this to find issues of the prototypes they are working on.

Unmoderated Remote Usability Testing

This is a bit similar to moderate testing but this doesn’t require the attention of a moderator. The participants can work remotely and just answer questionnaires. This is preferred by professionals who have a limited budget as the participants are not required to come in.

This means that the participants can complete the tasks in their own environment. It is basically faster than moderated testing. The data that the researcher need can be available in just a few hours. However, this still depends on the sample size and how thorough the questions are.

This is best to use when you need to get large samples for your research and for simple and easy tasks.

Beta Testing

This is a kind of test that you roll out if your website is almost complete. You can either select customer or individuals to try your website or make the almost complete website available to everybody.

This method allows the user or tester to file bug reports. Aside from that, you can also ask questions to the users regarding their experience.

A/B Testing

This method is ideal for website designers who are having a hard time choosing which element could work best. When doing this test, you have to show the two versions of the website to the participants.

Your questionnaires should always allow the participants to choose which version is better during a specific task. This is also best when comparing two or multiple designs and functionalities.

Focus Group Discussion

This is a method that allows the researchers and participants or users to discuss the usability of your website. You can get four or more users to discuss what they think about your product and website.

This method requires a moderator who will run the discussion. The moderator is responsible for asking questions and maintaining the group’s focus. This method is best to use if you want to discover the preferences of your website users.

Surveys

Giving out surveys or questionnaire is one of the easiest ways for you to get the thoughts of your users about the website. It doesn’t require much time and supervision to send out surveys to your users.

There are many ways for you to create a survey. You can use tools like SurveyMonkey and Google Forms to input your questionnaires. It’s the quickest way to obtain data from a large group of users.