Imagine creating an application, website, or any other product your customers love. They rely on it so much that they can’t picture themselves using another product to solve their problems or perform their tasks.
They talk to their friends about it and encourage them to ditch the product they are using and purchase yours because your product is more enjoyable and easy to use; the number of subscribers to your product continues to skyrocket every day. Your users are happy with your product, and your business is doing great.
Performing usability testing for your product creates a win-win experience for everyone. It doesn’t only improve the quality and usability of your product; it keeps your audience satisfied, so they keep coming back for more.
The result of this? Higher customer retention rate, increased subscriber rate, and, of course, the ultimate boost of your bottom line.
But that’s not all. Usability testing does a lot more for your business in ways you would never have imagined. So let’s unveil the different ways conducting user testing for your product can transform your business.
Firstly, what is usability testing, and what is it not?
What is usability testing?
What comes to mind when you come across “usability testing?’’ A bunch of market research questions? Or a long duration of interview sessions?
If you think usability testing is simply examining users’ thoughts and opinions about a product by conducting market research and interviews, you are wrong. Unlike market research that focuses primarily on what your users think about your products by understanding their motivations and taking in their opinions, usability testing is a lot deeper.
Usability testing doesn’t dwell only on paperwork. Instead, it places your product in front of real users and examines how they interact with your product in the real world. It examines real customers’ experiences to identify their challenges and pain points to make adequate improvement.
Designers who put their users’ needs at heart don’t just dwell on their perceptions to produce and launch their product. Instead, they figure out how their users will respond to their products and the possible issues their users may encounter to find ways to fix these issues right before they launch.
They don’t do this through guesswork or by sampling their users’ opinions after launching the product; they conduct usability testing. This helps them to identify the possible challenges users may have with their products and fix them right before they launch the product to the public.
Usability testing occurs at two major points of a design process.
- First, it is carried out at the early stage of a products’ development stage.
- Then, it’s conducted at the final stages of the design process.
When you conduct usability testing at the initial stage of your design process, you can note your users’ pain points and improve your product to solve their problems. On the other hand, usability testing at the final stage confirms if those challenges have been fixed before launching your product.
How conducting usability testing can help your business grow quickly
Conducting usability testing for your product goes a long way in growing your business. Here are exceptional growth benefits your business enjoys through usability testing.
It helps you save big on money, time, and effort
Usability testing helps you to maximize time, resources, and efforts to grow your business.
When you conduct usability testing before launching your product, it’s easier to fix the difficulties or challenges your users may have with your product.
This helps you save time, effort, and money because the bugs are fixed quickly, easily, and without spending tons of money. However, if you wait to launch a product before you identify your users’ problems and fix them, you will spend more money and effort to get those issues fixed.
Why?
Because the product has been fully designed, and to fix the issues (especially issues at the early stages), it will take a lot of dismantling to get to where the problem is and fix it. In the process, you will be paying extra for the resources used.
It gets worse when you have to redesign the entire product from scratch.
It typically means you would be re-investing the time and effort, and money you used to produce the first product again, which is bad for your business because all that time spent can be invested into other important areas of your business.
If you want to save time and resources while designing your product, you must make smart choices. And this involves learning to conduct usability testing at the initial stage of your product and later at the latter stage of your products’ development.
It helps you satisfy your customers better
Imagine using an application for the first time and experiencing several bugs. First, you have to wait many minutes for its pages to load; secondly, you find navigating through every function a chore.
How would this make you feel? Frustrated is our best bet. This is exactly how your users feel when they use a product that didn’t pass through efficient usability testing before launch.
Conducting usability testing on a product helps you discover these difficulties and fix them right before your users start to use it.
So, rather than experience a slow and difficult navigation experience while using your products, your users will have a seamless and enjoyable experience that will leave them satisfied whenever they use your product.
In return, users will have repeated experiences with your product, which means there would be a low customer churn rate that will keep the money coming in.
It allows you to witness real users’ experiences
Usability testing works by observing actual users’ experiences with your product.
This means the insights you acquire from usability testing aren’t hypotheses or third-party opinions. Instead, they are real and accurate; they are facts you can see for yourself instantly.
The authenticity and accuracy of usability testing drives you to make the right decisions on your product.
You get to make improvements in the areas that really need fixing to create the perfect experiences for your customers.
It allows you to build quality products that give you an edge over your competitors
The best way to position yourself as a voice to reckon with is to create quality, functional products that stand out.
Products that solve your users’ problems and products that meet your customers’ needs are classified as functional and of good quality. That is what conducting usability testing helps you achieve with your products.
It doesn’t end there; conducting usability testing helps your product stand out from its competitors.
The chances are that your competitors don’t perform usability testing, and chances are they are going about it the wrong way (that is, conducting usability testing after launching their product or performing market research in place of usability testing).
This means, while your customers are producing inferior products with annoying bugs that frustrate their users, you will be launching the perfect products that make your customers happy.
In the end, you will be able to attract new customers to yourself on a consistent basis while setting a reputation of quality product delivery in the minds of your customers.
It helps you identify how well your customers use your product
Usability testing doesn’t only help you meet your users’ expectations; it ensures that your expectations as a company are met too.
For example, if you place forms for your users to fill when they get to your website, you want to make sure they fill the forms correctly and follow the right steps after they do.
However, you may not be able to know if your users are performing the desired action without conducting usability testing. It will help you observe directly if your users are taking the right steps on your application.
This enables you to make adequate improvements and get your users to take appropriate action with your products.
Critical parameters to test when conducting usability testing
Certain parameters need to be considered when conducting effective usability testing that brings the right outcome. Check them out below:
Learning curve
When conducting usability testing, you should examine how straightforward your product is for use. How fast would it be to navigate tasks on your application when they use it for the first time? How long does it take to understand how your product works?
Understanding this would help you know the areas to work on to improve your products’ intuitiveness.
Content
When carrying out usability testing, you should ensure your product has all the information users need to make the best use of it. It’s also important to figure out how clear the information is, so you don’t get users confused.
Functionality
Another factor you want to ensure is how practical your product is for use. Are users able to perform the tasks they want to perform on your application? If they can’t, then your product needs to be modified to enable users to perform their preferred action with your product.
Conclusion
Usability testing contributes immensely to your business’s success. It helps you save money, time, resources and also helps you satisfy your customers’ needs. This article discussed more of the exceptional benefits you would find when you introduce user testing to your production process.
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