Usability Testing

Usability testing will provide you with insight into what users think about your website or application as well as common patterns of behaviour, to help guide future design decisions. You’ll be able to understand any common barriers and pain points, and what you can do to address these in order to increase satisfaction, engagement and conversion rates.

The qualitative and quantitative insight delivered through different usability testing approaches also enables you to benchmark current performance of your User Interface (UI) design and measure the impact of any improvement activities. We’ll provide you with the results of user surveys rating various aspects of your website or application – including a Net Promoter Score where relevant – along with in-depth analysis of their journeys and feedback, informing our expert recommendations.

Where required, direct quotes and video clips can be included in your report to give you the evidence you need to shape your future strategy roadmap, and demonstrate to senior stakeholders the business case for further investment.

User experience testing can deliver value throughout the full lifecycle of your website or application. Conducting testing with low-fidelity UI design prototypes during the build phase can help identify and resolve any usability problems at an early stage to avoid unexpected costs appearing later in the build or following launch – when fixes can be up to 100 times as expensive as those made before development is complete.

Conducting final user testing for a product’s usability validates that your site or application performs well before significant investment is committed, helping improve project margins and enabling you to focus your budget on extending and enhancing services to create additional value for your business and your users.

Usability testing is also ideal for diagnosing issues with a website or application that you feel is underperforming, enabling you to pinpoint areas for improvement and providing a cost-effective way to enhance performance. It’s also important to regularly test your websites and applications, to identify areas for ongoing improvement, as well as uncovering additional opportunities that may have been overlooked.

The returns from usability testing activities have been proven to be significant and, importantly, long-term, and with usability increasingly a dominant competitive differentiator, it is a critical consideration for all organisations.

By observing how users representative of your target audience really interact with your services, usability testing delivers an independent picture of what is and isn’t working on your app, site or platform; reducing the risk of false assumptions being made and keeping all decisions focused on the needs of real-world users to ensure that your final products are as useful and usable as possible.

Testing is particularly important if you serve a highly-specific or particularly diverse user base, and at Box UK we work with specialist recruitment partners to ensure your testing participants reflect your real users and help you balance what may be multiple complex requirements.

Your usability testing plan will be tailored according to the specific techniques being used and following discussion of your target audience, device requirements and any additional considerations, providing a web usability testing checklist to ensure priority areas and journeys are covered.

Typically though, usability testing is performed by asking participants to complete a series of tasks on a website or application, and studying and analysing their actions. Participants are often encouraged to use a ‘think aloud’ technique to provide greater insight into their first impressions, mental models, and expand on any areas of particular interest.

In moderated UX testing scenarios participants are guided through these tasks by a UX consultant, and observed by a second consultant watching via a streaming video link. A camera will be used to record the participant’s actions and audio (as they speak aloud) during the moderated test, while specialist software records screen activity (and finger gestures if touchscreen devices are used). Eye tracking studies can also be conducted, to assess how test participants understand your site or application and its content.

In unmoderated user experience testing – which is used to cost-effectively gather large volumes of quantitative insight – recordings of participants and their screens are captured along with survey data, to support subsequent analysis and recommendations.