Is Your Design Has a Good UX?
This article is made for the Software Project course assignment, Faculty of Computer Science, Universitas Indonesia
After we design a product, we expect our product to have a good User Experience (UX). Sometimes what we think is not the same as what user think, maybe user think that current product design still not have a good UX. If the design is still not good, we need to fix the design so it has a good UX from user perspective. How do we know that our design still not have a good UX? The answer is by conducting usability testing.
Usability testing is a popular UX research methodology where the researcher asks participants to perform some tasks using a product, observe their behavior while using the product, and listen for their feedbacks. If your product has a good usability so your product has a good UX.
There are some things that you need to prepare before conducting an usability testing:
1. You need to make the prototype of the design that you want to test so the participant can perform tasks that you asked using that prototype.
2. You also need to make task scenarios. Task scenario is the action that you ask the participant to take on the prototype design. Task scenarios need to provide context so users engage with the interface and pretend to perform business or personal tasks as if they were at home or in the office.
Bad task scenarios often focus too much on specific feature of a product so the participant is forced to use that specific feature rather than seeing if and how the participant choose a feature to use the interface.
Here is some tips to improve your task scenarios so you can get better result from usability testing:
- Make the Task Realistic
Asking a participant to do something that he would not normally do will make him try to complete the task without really engaging with the interface.
Example:
User goal: Browse product offerings and purchase an item.
Poor task: Purchase a pair of orange Nike running shoes.
Better task: Buy a pair of shoes for less than $40. - Make the task actionable
It’s best to ask the users to do the action, rather than asking them how they would do it.
Example:
User goal: Find movie and show times.
Poor task: You want to see a movie Sunday afternoon. Go to www.fandango.com and tell me where you’d click next.
Better task: Use www.fandago.com to find a movie you’d be interested in seeing on Sunday afternoon. - Avoid giving clues and describing the steps
You want to observe the participant’s behavior when you conduct an usability testing, you want to see how they use the product so we must not giving them clues when performing a task.
Example:
User goal: Look up grades.
Poor task: You want to see the results of your midterm exams. Go to the website, sign in, and tell me where you would click to get your transcript.
Better task: Look up the results of your midterm exams.
If you have prepare all things that mentioned above, then all you need to do is find participant, do usability testing with them by giving them the task scenarios and they do the tasks using the design prototype. If you want to do it online, you can use Google Meet, Zoom, or anything else to do usability testing. If you do it online, you should ask the participant to share their screen so you can see their behavior by looking at their cursor.
If you want to measure how good is the usability of your product, one of the ways you can try is give the participant System Usability Scale (SUS) after the usability testing is over. SUS is a tool to measure usability that consist of 10 item questionnaire with five response options. Participant will answer the questions based on their experience of doing the tasks you just gave earlier. To interpret the score, we sum all the score and then multiply it by 2.5. Based on the research, if the score is above 68, it means the usability is considered above average and the usability is considered below average if the score is below 68. Here is the example of SUS.
From the example above, we know that the usability is below average because the SUS score is 55.
That’s it for this article, I hope this article helps you to understand more about usability testing and you can start do your own usability testing properly. Thank you!
