Usability Testing: Five Questions Before Getting Started

Usability testing is essential for any company’s website. It allows you to see your website and its content with fresh eyes, picks out any obvious errors you might be missing, and ensures the best user experience possible.

But how do you get started with it?

To help you plan your next round of usability testing, here are five questions you need to ask yourself before getting started.

Five Questions For Usability Testing

1) What will you test?

Knowing what you are actually testing is the first and most important step .

While this may sound obvious, there is a huge number of tests you might actually run on your website (check out this post for some ideas).

Being crystal clear about what you are going to test ensures the process is quick and effective.

2) What tasks will you do?

Once you know what you will test, it’s time to determine your actions.

There are plenty of ways to test a website, and it will all depend on what you are actually testing. Depending on this, deciding on your tasks (and tools to use) is typically straightforward.

3) Who will conduct the usability testing?

This is a crucial question because it helps you assign clear roles to your team members.

Assuming people on your time will be the ones responsible for testing, make your expectations crystal clear. What do they need to do, when do they need to do it, and how will they record their results? 

These are all questions you need to answer before assigning roles.

4) What is your standard for usability testing success?

If you don’t know what “success” looks like in your usability testing, you will never know if you have actually achieved it.

How long should a page take to load? Where should a call to action button take you? How should your website navigation function?

Before your team gets started, they need to know how your site should be functioning in the first place!

5) What is your action plan after you are done?

This is the entire point of usability testing: finding out what  can be improved and acting to make it happen. Assuming you have completed the previous step and your usability testing has found errors, it’s time to act.

What will your team do to fix these problems? What’s the deadline for bringing these fixes live?

Remember this: all the usability testing in the world doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t actively tweaking what you find!

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