When you redesign a product you should test its usability before release. This will ensure that your product will be able to achieve its purpose and help the users to reach their goals.
Now, if you are wondering when you should conduct usability testing for your product, the answer is pretty simple: at all times and phases as possible.
Usability Testing for a Better UX Design
Ideally, usability testing will help you to be successful and your product to be useful. It is an indispensable part of product development and you should follow it before a redesign, during the redesign and finally after the redesign.
Testing at different stages
There are lots of reasons as to why you should conduct usability testing during all phases of your creation process.
Before:
It may sound a bit silly to you when you are asked to conduct usability testing even before a redesign. However, if you give a second thought to it you will know that when you test an existing product it will provide you with all sorts of info regarding:
- The flaws
- The reasons for it lows or no functionality
- The areas of development to ensure enhanced user experience and
- To get better ideas for the redesign.
In short, you will be able to identify fast and easily the biggest pain points of the existing product on offer and work accordingly to resolve the issues.
It is also recommended that during the process of testing you take a look at the products of your computers and if your budget and time permits you may put them through usability tests as well.
- This will let you know what is working well for your competitors that your product is lacking in and
- It will also help you to identify any areas that simply do not fit in well or work.
This will inevitably save you a lot of time and effort while trying to find out these ideas yourself.
During:
It goes without saying that you should continually test your product during UX web design or redesign. This will help you to find out whether or not you are progressing on the right track even though you do not have a finished product to play with, yet.
During your designing process, you can test on several other components of the unfinished product such as:
- The sketches
- The wireframes and
- The prototypes.
Ideally, this is a quick process, though designers find it a dirty approach as well, that will help you to save a fortune in your development time.
- Such testing run over a design, before it is put to production will allow you to know if your idea has the ability and the desired mileage to prove to be truly valuable for the user.
- It will also help you to know whether or not you have misinterpreted what the users really wanted from your product.
Ideally, you should run such tests after you reach every milestone during the project if your resources exist. If you have limited resources then make sure that you choose the most critical milestones that you may have reached and run the usability tests against those.
After:
Usability testing after a redesign is easy and goes without saying that you should do it at any cost. Ideally, this is the stage when most of the usability tests occur.
This is the particular time when you put the new product to test to find out the paces and it’s level of performance before you release it.
However, the primary objective of such usability testing after the redesign is not to test its functionality. This is usually a function of the quality assurance department, which you should surely have.
The main objective of testing your product after the redesign is to test the experience that it provides with its induced functionality. Such testing will help you to detect things like:
- Presence of any bugs
- Whether or not there are any niggles in it as well as
- Existence of any user experience issues.
When you discover anything in the product, you are recommended to share those things with your quality assurance team so that they can add these things when they test the product, if they have not done it already.
The project roadmap
When you conduct usability testing it will help you to create, follow and stick to your project roadmap. Remember, there is no point in conducting such tests unless you use the results in your project development process for creating a better product. Therefore, make sure that your usability testing efforts and needs feature on the project roadmap for release.
Typically, you will need a lot of time other than an effort to run usability tests. You will need time to:
- Conduct the tests itself
- Analyze the results obtained
- Put your findings into more useful practice.
Remember, it may appear to be very tempting in particular to conduct a post-design usability testing just a few days before the launch of the product. However, in reality, it is a better practice to provide yourself with a bigger window than that for your Usability testing after the designing process is completed.
You will be better off this way as you will know whether or not the experience is broken. This will give you enough time to fix it before you launch the product. This may even save you from any further iteration regardless of when it is.
The takeaway
The most significant factors that will provide better user experience are simplicity and functionality of your product.
With usability testing, you as a UX designer will be able to provide your users exactly with these as such testing will help you to dig deeper into the intricacies in it right from user goals achievement to system constraints. You will be able to provide the desired output in a more beautiful and easy way.
Therefore, no matter how much effort and time it takes, do not skip usability testing. It will help you to align your user goals to the system pathways and tools in a much better way.
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