Usability evaluation and testing – with users

To ensure that a site or application is usable, it is essential to test the design with users in a way that mirrors as closely as possible how they will work with the finished product.

Understanding particular users in context

It’s more effective to test with users, because each set of users reacts differently in each new context.

What we do

For testing, we use a representative sample of users to run through real tasks. We observe what they do and ask questions to find out issues about how they work, and what is going right and wrong with the current design.

This testing isn’t intended to produce a statistically valid quantitative result. Instead it’s qualitative – it lets us find out what the range of problems is, and leads us in the right direction for a redesign.

Sometimes this takes place on site (eg. in an office, people’s homes) and sometimes at your premises, or ours.

We often record the proceedings on video (depending on the situation), so that it can be referred to later, and you can observe the sessions from another room.

We can do open-ended exploration, where the user chooses their task and which screens they’ll look at; or we can do scenario-based testing, where the user is asked to imagine that they are a particular user solving a particular problem.

What you get

The format of usability evaluation deliverables often depends on the objectives, scale and type of the evaluation.

We also create presentations of findings to communicate to key stakeholders from business, technical, marketing and product areas. Our approach has proven effective at building buy-in among stakeholders and facilitating smooth change to adopt design recommendations, even on large, complex projects.