What’s a UX test, and how can it improve your site’s design? When is it the right time to run one?
UX testing is a powerful tool for enhancing your website’s user experience. By observing real users interact with your site, you can identify and fix issues that might be hindering its effectiveness. Steve Krug offers expert advice on conducting these tests in his book Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited.
Keep reading to learn how to run UX tests and integrate them into your development process.
UX Testing
Krug believes that if you want to deliver the best possible user experience, it’s crucial to continually test and optimize your website design. Let’s explain what these UX tests should look like, how to run them, and how to work them into your schedule.
What’s a UX Test?
In a UX test, you observe individual users attempting to accomplish typical tasks with your website to identify potential points of confusion or frustration. According to Krug, UX testing is an invaluable way to improve your website. Testing helps you identify specific design elements that do or don’t work.
How to Run a UX Test
Krug explains that you need very little to conduct a UX test—just a quiet room with a computer and internet access. One person facilitates the test by prodding the participant to explain their thought process as they accomplish a set of tasks while navigating your site. Getting inside your user’s head like this will help you diagnose issues with your website that may not be obvious to you or other team members who are too close to the problem.
The testing process itself is simple: Welcome the user and make them feel comfortable, have them open your home page and complete a few assigned tasks on your site, then ask them questions to clarify anything they did that you don’t fully understand. By the end, you should have a list of specific ways that your website is confusing or inefficient, giving you direction on how to improve it.
When Should You Run a UX Test?
Krug suggests starting to test as soon as possible and then continuing throughout the website-building process. The earlier you diagnose issues through testing, the easier it is to make major changes if necessary since your website is less set in stone.
Conduct UX tests once a month. According to Krug, this keeps the testing manageable enough to fit into your schedule yet frequent enough to regularly identify and fix issues over the course of the project. These monthly tests shouldn’t take longer than a single morning. After each test, meet with your team to prioritize the most critical issues to address before the next round of testing.
| How to Run Unmoderated UX Tests While Krug asserts that the best way to test users is to personally draw insights from them as they navigate your site, unmoderated UX tests are a popular alternative. In these tests, participants complete a set of tasks on your website by themselves while you record their actions and decisions, then they answer questions about their experience. Instead of walking participants through the process, you send it remotely and allow them to complete it on their own time. Since unmoderated tests don’t require human intervention, you can conduct many at once, making them helpful if you need a large quantity of feedback or if you want to collect data on a wide range of demographics. That said, it may be more difficult to identify complicated issues with your website, since you won’t be there to ask specific questions and help users articulate which elements aren’t working well. Unmoderated usability tests are valuable at any point in the development process, but they’re typically conducted later on. Since no one will be there to guide participants, unmoderated tests work best when you have a near-complete, usable product rather than an early prototype, which may require more explanation to navigate. |
