Five Common Usability Testing Mistakes to Avoid

Usability testing is not an easy thing to perfect. However, a good starting point is to identify where most mistakes are made throughout the process. And through this awareness, you should fine-tune your approaches to planning, moderation and analysis, in order to attain truly insightful findings.

1. Recruiting Unsuitable Participants
It’s vital that you validate a design through the eyes of your user. But who are your users? Work with marketing folks to understand your target audience, and screen potential participants accordingly. If you have recruited participants that are too advanced, they might not uncover usability issues that a more typical user might experience. Regardless of how good the moderator might be, if you don’t have suitable and relevant participants, you won’t be getting an accurate usability assessment.

2. Not identifying the Critical Tasks
Have you identified the primary use cases and goal-oriented tasks? Really think critically here, and focus on the most important ones only. Hopefully you have already designed the user interface around these tasks, so bring them into the test. Write a test script that includes a moderator guide, and provide context to the tasks. Make users feel like they are in a real-life situation by telling them a story eg: “It’s 5 days before Christmas and you need to buy your nephew in Germany a Nintendo Wii.” Critical tasks are not only a usability concern, they’re equally impactful on the business.

Associated Link: Full five tips on uxbydesign.org

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