How to Conduct Usability Tests

How to Improve Your Website With Usability Testing

You already have a website, but its results are disappointing? Before throwing everything away and starting from scratch, there is one very important step that many teams skip: usability testing. By observing real people interact with your interface, you can identify problems where they actually occur. You can then make better decisions and offer a user experience that truly meets your visitors’ needs.

What Is a Usability Test?

A usability test in a digital context asks participants to complete a task or series of actions on an interface. You can therefore test your website, but also an application or digital product. Participants’ behaviours and thoughts are then analyzed by designers and developers to evaluate how real people interact with the platform. What makes usability testing so powerful is the authentic reactions of participants discovering the platform. Your internal team should therefore not take part: their knowledge of the product inevitably influences how they interact with it and biases the results.

The main goal is to anticipate friction points on a platform so they can be corrected before launch, improving the user experience. The data collected can be qualitative, to understand the reasons behind behaviours, or quantitative, to measure success or failure rates.

When Should You Conduct Usability Tests?

Usability testing can be done at any stage of interface design. The first test can take place as soon as you have a prototype, helping you quickly identify the elements that harm the user experience. Other tests can then be carried out throughout development, and again once the platform is launched, so you can continue optimizing it.

The Concrete Benefits of Usability Testing

Conducting usability tests requires time from a development team, but they are essential for creating a smooth user experience that makes visitors want to return to your website or application.

When done early in the creation process, usability testing helps detect friction points before the site even goes live, when changes are still easy to make. The cost will therefore be much lower, because the longer you wait to correct a problem, the more deeply it becomes integrated into the product’s structure and the longer and more expensive it becomes to fix.

These friction points are sometimes different from what the team expected. Thanks to usability testing, you can make sure you are identifying issues experienced by real users who are discovering the platform for the first time. Their observations can help you correct several problems, such as confusing navigation, unclear instructions, or a lack of accessibility.

Usability testing also allows you to make decisions based on concrete observations rather than team assumptions or random research. This is a major advantage: while intuition can lead to costly or ineffective choices, the data collected during testing gives you a clear and justified direction. You invest your efforts where they will have a real impact.

How to Conduct a Usability Test: Key Steps

1. Define a Specific Objective

Before starting a usability test, it is important to know why you want to conduct it. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Which aspects of the platform do you want to evaluate?

• What types of tasks will participants need to complete?

• What will the evaluation criteria be?

• What financial, human, and time resources can you allocate to the test?

These elements will help you create a more precise plan for the tasks participants will complete, allowing you to collect relevant data for the next stage of design.

2. Choose the Right Participants

As mentioned earlier, your internal team is not a good candidate for an objective usability test. Participants should instead come from your company’s or platform’s target audience. Make sure you represent the full diversity of that community, including age, gender, nationality, socioeconomic background, education level, and more. The more diverse your participant pool is, the more representative your feedback will be.

Asking qualification questions to people interested in participating will help you select only the most relevant candidates.

3. Determine Your Testing Method

When planning your test, you need to make two decisions about the method used:

• Will your test be conducted in person or remotely?

• Will it be moderated or unmoderated?

Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages.

If the test takes place in person, you will be better able to observe participants’ nonverbal cues, but you will also need to dedicate more resources to it, and your pool of candidates willing to travel will be smaller. Remotely, you will test your interface in a realistic environment, since participants will use their own devices, and the flexibility of the format will allow more people to take part. However, it may be harder to get nuanced feedback, especially if participants proceed independently.

If you decide to moderate the test, you will guide participants and allow them to expand on their observations, which enriches the quality of the data collected. However, the presence of a moderator can influence participants’ behaviour and introduce unintentional bias into their responses. In an unmoderated test, participants move forward independently, but you cannot ask any questions beyond those planned in advance.

4. Prepare a Test Script

Before putting the test in participants’ hands, you will need to prepare a script. This is a document that includes an introduction to give them context, instructions on how the test will be conducted, and a list of tasks to complete. It should also include questions and prompts to guide their reflection and help you gather more complete feedback. You can also plan what you want to cover during the debriefing session, where you will discuss their experience with your platform one last time.

5. Test the Test

Once your script is ready, test it. Follow the instructions exactly to make sure none of them are confusing. This will help you identify logistical challenges and adjust the documentation before the real test, so everything runs as smoothly as possible.

6. Conduct the Test

While participants complete the test, or while you watch the recording if you have chosen an unmoderated remote method, you will need to observe their behaviours and take as many notes as possible.

If the test is moderated, encourage participants to expand on their thoughts by asking open-ended questions and avoid questions that steer their answers toward an expected conclusion. You will need to stay neutral in both your tone and body language: even an involuntary reaction can influence what a participant chooses to share. Also create a calm and comfortable environment where participants feel free to express their difficulties without fear of being judged, because their hesitations and mistakes will be valuable to you.

7. Analyze the Results

Use your notes to extract qualitative data that will help you understand why a participant acted in a certain way. During the analysis, also include quantitative data, such as the completion rate for each task or the average time required to complete it. The report and conclusions following your analysis will give you key information about the changes that should be made to your interface.

Usability testing is not reserved for large development teams with major budgets. Even on a small scale, observing a few users interact with your interface can reveal unexpected problems and guide your efforts toward what will pay off the most. And it all starts with your website, because it is the first interface your clients encounter. With WebSelf, you have an intuitive tool to create and evolve a site that truly meets your visitors’ needs. Why not take advantage of it?

What Should You Know About Usability Testing?

• A usability test consists of observing real people completing tasks on a digital interface in order to identify friction points.

• The earlier a problem is detected in the development process, the less expensive it is to fix.

• Participants must represent the real target audience, not the internal team, whose familiarity with the product biases the results.

• A well-prepared test relies on a structured script: context, tasks to complete, open-ended questions, and final debriefing.

• Qualitative data explains why a user experienced difficulty. Quantitative data measures the scale of the problem.