Usability testing
studies representative users of your product performing representative
tasks. Through creating structured interactions by multiple users
(particularly new users) with the product or website, usability
testing elicits as wide a range of paths for error as possible.
Test participants with an appropriate level of naiveté about
the product provide insights about simple usability glitches.
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Any product that has a functioning prototype
or better. Usability testing can be performed on almost any product
that a human can interact with. In computer products, usability
testing is most useful for identifying surface problems which can
be fixed with changes to visual appearance and interaction techniques.
Often trained facilitators can recommend fixes to these types of
problems on the basis of the usability testing data. Usability testing
is not good at producing fixes for information architecture problems.
The data that usability testing generates does not usually clarify
which changes would best fix the problem once it is identified.
Usability testing that tests a single product is called non-comparative.
Likewise, we can do comparative usability testing that tests two
or more products and compares them to each other. Comparative testing
is sometimes also referred to as benchmarking. This is a
good way to determine how your product's ease of use stacks up against
its competitors'.
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