Website usability testing workflow in 6 steps

Having a good usability testing work flow in place can save you time so you can spend your time doing what you do best: designing. The process can be broken down into 6 steps:

Identify what you need to test and why you’re testing it

No test is going to go well if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Make sure to have a firm understanding of the scope of user experience. You might want to test the navigation flow of your site, the position of a call to action button or even just the web copy. Whatever you endeavor to test make note of it.

Know your audience

Who is your desired user?Knowing who your audience is will strengthen the design process and allow you to understand the parameters of your designs. By understanding your audience you can design better for them — why not look into empathy maps so you can really get into your user’s shoes?

Write a task list for users to go through

Guidelines are needed to help your users through the test. Presumably, you’ll have some goals in place that you want the user to achieve on your website. Maybe you want them to sign up to something or learn about the services you have on offer? Whatever the goal, write it down. These goals can then be turned into task scenarios which can encourage action from your users.

Find worthwhile participants to test

There are many usability tools out there which can help you find users to test. But, you really want to find participants who are your target audience, not strangers who are pretending to be your users. Using real life users is going to give you more accurate information that you can use as you iterate through the design process. Don’t forget that you can use the tools already integrated with Justinmind to get instant feedback.

Get stakeholders involved

With Justinmind’s powerful sharing capabilities, you can have all key stakeholders on the right page. When you invite them to your prototypes, you can give them the ability to leave comments on specific UI components. Having stakeholders engaged at this stage can align their wants and needs cohesively as the design process flourishes. For an even smoother website usability testing process, don’t neglect capturing UX requirements for usability testing.

Put your findings into practice

Now you can put all your learnings into practice by implementing your findings. You’ll have uncovered the errors (both critical and non-critical), understood the likes, dislikes and recommendations as well as how long tasks take on your website. Now all that’s left is to make the appropriate iterations to your interactive prototypes and get them sent off to production of user testing.