Why is app usability testing important?

App has made our lives convenient at various levels, from booking cabs, ordering food online, reading e-books, and playing games, to every day-to-day task is dependent on apps. They are getting popular for the ease and simplicity they offer; any complexity may leave the users frustrated and turn them to competitors. Hence, to attract and retain users, it is important to build apps with great usability. The success of the app lies in its simplicity and seamless usability, any kind of complexity or inflexibility will often affect the brand.

App usability is an important parameter that offers an enjoyable user experience, and its effectiveness can be defined by usability testing. Like functional and non-functional testing, usability is also considered a vital testing parameter as it is directly linked to user experience. Hence, organizations are creating an effective usability testing strategy to build user-centric apps in order to improve the app download number and gain high business revenue.

Understanding Usability Testing

As the saying goes ‘customer is the king,’ the product that one is selling should be designed as per the customer preferences; the more it is aligned with the customers' requirements, the easy it is to sell. This is true for apps too; apps are created and made available on the Play Store for the users to download and use, hence, developers should build them in alignment with the users’ perspective.

Organizations often focus on functions, performance, and security of an app and seldom think of the app’s usability. App’s usability is an important parameter that developers cannot afford to miss, it should be tested thoroughly to ensure that the app will provide a great experience to the users upon release. Generally, usability testing is conducted by real users to monitor the app’s behavior, how well it engages the users, how the experience is, and how seamless the functioning of the app is, any deviation from the result will lead to making changes in the app to meet all the usability requirements. Usability testing mostly emphasizes UI design, navigation, UX, and functionality.

How does usability testing help?

• Improves app quality
• Ensures to offer a seamless user experience
• Performs tasks with ease
• Improves the process effectiveness
• Identifies and removes any error that affects the app’s usability
• Encourages easy and self-explanatory design for better user interaction
• How to Perform Usability Testing

It is clear that usability testing is important to ensure the users are having a great experience with the app and they repeatedly return to the app. To achieve greater app usability, here are some of the key points the testers should include in their usability testing strategy.

Strategizing: Creating an effective plan is necessary to ensure that the process is carried out as expected. Testers should have a clear idea of the usability testing method they are going to use, the number of testers that might be required, the target demographics, and the test report analysis.

Hiring real users: Based on the plan, the tester should hire real-world users to perform usability testing. Here, the people hired should match the criteria of the users, for example, if it’s an educational app like Byju’s the target testing batch would be school-going students, if it is a travelling app, it would involve businessmen, Instagram travel influencers, etc.

Execution: Once the actionable plan is clear and the testers are ready, usability testing is executed.

Report analysis: After the execution, the report is analyzed to check if the usability criteria are matching with the obtained results.

Any deviation from the result is subjected to further corrections until it matches the expected value.

Conclusion

As usability is linked to the user experience which will decide the success or failure of the app, usability testing is a critical parameter. It offers immense scope for companies to improve their design and business processes. Further, good usability of the app will increase the number of downloads, which will in turn help the organization improve their brand value and business revenue.