Website and Apps Usability Tests
The influence of the internet in one’s relationship with consumption has grown substantially on the Brazilian and international market and this seems to be no turning back. Consumers are more and more connected to brands, products and services through the web and prove increasingly open to buying online.
This scenario points to the growing importance of optimizing user interaction with a website or application – its design must promote a relevant, efficient, gratifying product-user-context dialogue ➨ to offer a satisfactory, memorable experience with the brand, promoting loyalty and, obviously, increasing the chances of an actual purchase and offering solutions that will help people achieve their goals.
Usability tests are generally used to:
- Assess the market’s receptivity to a new product / interface.
- Identify areas for optimizing product interaction and minimize the risks of usability flaws; identify the level of learning ease.
- Uncover and understand the origin of unexpected/undesired behavior (i.e., low sign-up rate, high shopping cart abandonment rate…).
- Compare different interface versions.
- Compare a product with the competition and identify ways of establishing competitive advantages.
The usability test can adopt different analysis metrics – these metrics must be defined according to the objectives and challenges of each project.
Some metrics used:
- Task execution time, ease of learning and memorizing the browsing paths.
- Number of mistakes made during task execution.
- Mistake rate and level of seriousness of the mistakes made.
- Task completion and abandonment rates.
- Number of clicks required for a given task.
- User comments on the interact.
- Level of satisfaction with the experience.
Usability tests use specific software to record user interaction with the mouse, touch screen or keyboard.