Integrating Usability Testing into Your UX Process

Acting on the Results of a Usability Study

Once you’ve completed your usability study, what you do next is critical. You have a valuable source of knowledge and need to make the most of it.

First, you should layer the results of your usability study on top of insights from other sources. Does what you see in your Web analytics, click-tracking, scroll-mapping, user research, user surveys, and other sources of insights correlate with what you’ve learned from your study? Do your study’s results add further weight to those insights and help you make decisions?

Next, share what you have learned with stakeholders. You should share usability-testing results broadly—way beyond just your UX team. Make sure the product team, analysts, conversion team, marketing team, and any other key decision makers for your digital experience fully understand the learnings and next steps.

Now is the time to start taking action on the learnings from your study. There are three common approaches, as follows:

• Simply fix any fundamental flaws that testing has identified in your user experience. These include things such as minor bugs and issues that are breaking the user experience.
• Based on what you’ve learned during your study, create a set of hypotheses for improving the user experience and revise your design accordingly, then conduct A/B testing. This lets you validate any proposed changes with a large volume of real traffic on your site.
• Once you think you’ve addressed your key insights from testing, consider doing iterative rounds of usability testing to evaluate whether you’ve successfully addressed the key issues and assess whether there are any further learnings you could glean.

Integrating Usability Testing into Your UX Design Process

Once you’ve successfully conducted a usability study, consider where usability testing fits into your overall UX design process. I typically recommend the following sequence of usability-testing activities:

• usability temperature-check studies—On a quarterly or monthly basis, look at your key user journeys—for example, your primary marketing- or sales-funnel journey.
• prototyping and usability validation—Refine and validate all user journeys and user experiences before launch.
• post go-live usability studies—Test all new user experiences that your organization launches online.
• ad hoc studies—These studies align with new business initiatives that affect your digital experience.

Embedding Usability Testing into Your Organization’s Culture

Really making an impact on your organization’s customer centricity, consistently delivering holistic user experiences, driving growth, and increasing revenues requires a cultural shift. You must fully embed the values of experimentation and leveraging user feedback into your organization’s culture and day-to-day thinking. This takes time and definitely won’t happen overnight.

However, you can greatly increase your chances of success by bringing your whole organization along on the usability-testing journey through full transparency around what you’re testing and what you learn. Give other stakeholders in your organization the opportunity to conduct usability studies and drive experimentation initiatives themselves. Simple things such as setting up a meeting room with facilities for playing back video-clip loops of the most insightful customer quotations from a usability study makes this information accessible across your organization and increases engagement.

Conclusion

Creating a culture of customer centricity and perfecting digital user experience is increasingly becoming aligned with business success. While it’s not easy to embed this way of thinking across an organization, there are many ways in which you can approach this challenge. Usability testing—when it is done properly—is an effective way of starting on this journey, getting closer to your users, and building stakeholder interest in user experience and usability. Have you integrated usability testing into your UX design process?