Five Usability Testing Methods to Make Your Startup a Leader

Launching a startup is a complex challenge on many levels. It is a time when you need to constantly test your product to confirm or refute initial hypotheses, refine its design and usability.

The best way is to ask potential customers, who are unfamiliar with your product, to evaluate it through usability testing. Obtaining objective feedback from the target audience allows you to further improve the user experience.

There are various usability testing methods, each of which can make your startup a leader. In this article, we will explain in detail what usability testing is and the most popular ways to conduct it.

What is Usability Testing?

Essentially, usability testing is an indispensable method for evaluating how user-friendly a website, product, or service is for real users. While traditional testing may be conducted by a developer, designer, or project manager, usability testing collects feedback from real users—potential or existing customers.

The main advantage is that it eliminates any bias from developers and product designers. After all, what matters most is how potential buyers perceive your product, not what your designers and product experts think is best.

Why is Usability Testing Necessary?

Usability testing is necessary when developing or modifying a product because it helps:

1. Achieve intuitive design
Intuitive design increases customer interest in the product and stimulates demand. Therefore, every product or website should strive for this. According to statistics:

• Improved UX design can increase conversion rates by up to 400%.
• 88% of online shoppers say they will not return to a website after a poor user experience.
• 55% of companies conduct UX testing.

Note the last statistic—only 55% of companies conduct UX testing! If you truly want to get ahead of your competitors, you don’t always need complex and timely strategies. Most likely, you can pull ahead simply by conducting proper usability testing and then making the changes needed to improve your product. It’s that simple.

2. Generate new ideas
UX experts typically conduct usability testing at every product iteration, from early development to release. They do this because users are unpredictable, regardless of well-known UX trends. What seems logical to product designers may unexpectedly become irrelevant to users.

By observing user behavior during testing, you can propose ideas for further development of a feature that previously went unnoticed.

3. Reduce friction
Testers are detached from the emotions your team invests in the project.

So they will look at your product with fresh eyes and discover flows and friction you never even considered. The saying "dollars flow where friction is low" holds true for both UX and sales. If friction is high, users will naturally try to avoid it or find new, easier ways to achieve their end goal.

Timely problem identification. The most significant advantage of usability testing is that it allows you to identify issues with your product or website before you spend a lot of time and financial resources building something that doesn’t meet people’s needs. Usability testing does not require much time or, with some exceptions, effort.

Depending on the type of testing you plan to conduct, you may need a quiet room, session recording software, a list of questions to ask the target audience, a microphone, a camera, and you’re ready to go.

How to Recruit Users for Usability Testing

Users' time is valuable, especially for those who do not participate in usability testing for extra income. Therefore, to obtain objective feedback, it is necessary to conduct lean research. Here are some of the most popular ways to find participants for testing the UX of your product or website:

1. From a panel. This is the most popular and universal way to recruit participants. Essentially, you purchase the required number of responses from a service provider. It is ideal for benchmark studies, prototypes, architecture, and more. The most significant drawback of this method is that participants on such platforms are paid to take usability tests, and as a result, you may not get the most objective results.
2. From your website. It’s simple. You announce that you are conducting research on your site and ask visitors to sign up to participate. Since participants are not paid this time, you need to carefully plan the structure of the study to avoid repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Some WordPress page builders offer great templates that allow you to easily insert a call to action for the study.
3. Through social media. You can turn the testing into a gamified competition with a real reward for participation. Again, the issue is that users are likely to participate in the game to get the reward and may not be as objective as you hope.

Now let's look at some of the most popular usability testing methods.

1. Guerrilla Usability Testing

Guerrilla usability testing is a cheap, fast, and simple way to identify trends and user behavior to improve UX, especially when budget and time are limited. It is also called "corridor" testing because you approach random passersby in airports, cafes, libraries, or shopping malls and ask them to complete your study.

This method has been proven to yield valuable insights that, when applied, subsequently increase conversion, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce risks.

This gives you the opportunity to observe testers' body language, their first reactions when seeing your product or website, and the first actions they take to complete a given task. Face-to-face interaction and body language sometimes say more than words or tracking software. If you combine the guerrilla method with other types of usability testing that elicit different reactions, you can identify subtle trends and see the "big picture."

2. Phone or Online Interviews

If guerrilla testing limits you to a specific geographic area, good old phone and online interviews have eliminated those boundaries in recent years.

Phone interviews help you quickly test users in a wider geographic area and collect more data in a shorter period, especially during social distancing.

Since you are communicating with participants over the phone or via a computer screen rather than in person, you may quickly lose their interest. Therefore, make sure your study is concise.

3. Session Recordings

Session recording requires software that anonymously records user actions on your website. Recordings can include mouse clicks, scrolling, page exits, etc.

This is a great way to identify issues with site functionality, such as interaction with buttons and menus, places where users stumble, leave the site, or go back to previous pages instead of continuing along the intended path.

4. Online Testing Tools and Platforms

Nowadays, you can find numerous testing tools that allow you to observe user behavior on a website. Some can even collect audio and video recordings of users as they interact with your product or website and complete required tasks. These include:

• Heatmaps are a great visualization of where users click most often. It often turns out that most clicks happen on a static area of the site that was not originally intended for clicking.
• 5-second test is a simple way to collect a large amount of quality data about people's first impressions after landing on your site. Typically, users are only asked to look at a page and answer a question like "Who do you think is the target audience?"
• Eye tracking - an eye tracking test shows users' eye movements as they view your site. This information helps better understand what captures users' attention. Eye tracking complements heatmaps because users may not necessarily click on the element that attracts their attention.
• Surveys are tools that allow you to collect a large amount of information from many people with minimal effort. They are best suited when you are still conducting research and help better understand the target market.

Heuristic Evaluation

Heuristic evaluation is not exactly a typical usability test, because it is conducted when usability experts examine the UX of your product or website. They are skilled at identifying heuristic evaluation criteria and evaluating the product against them.

While classic usability testing involves people from the target audience who are not UX experts, heuristic testers are actually usability experts with heuristic evaluation. For best results, conduct this type of testing after each design iteration and before conducting user testing.

Conclusion

Usability testing is crucial for the success of your startup project. When developers and designers think about the design and functionality of your product, they see the project from their own perspective. However, they cannot see it through the eyes of users or predict all the flows and friction of the product. Therefore, it is best to let real users test the product and give their unbiased opinion.

Depending on your needs, goals, and resources, you can use some or all of the above methods and tools simultaneously. However, whichever data collection options you choose, be sure to analyze them properly and implement the findings. Then conduct retesting.