Working with end users to build a better product
PayReview, powered by Amite, has been designed to involve the end users of the pay and reward software throughout the development process. This helps create products that are useful and user-friendly.
Usability testing is one of the best methods for ensuring our software supports our customers in achieving their goals. This is because it places our software in front of real end users, so rather than our educated guess on what you need from your pay review software, we can get information ‘straight from the horse's mouth’ so to speak.
What is Usability Testing?
During research you can collect two types of data; quantitative and qualitative.
Quantitative data is structured and statistical. It generates numerical data and data that can be converted into statistics.
Qualitative research is primarily exploratory. It is more about delving deep into topics and gaining information about people and their motivations, how they think, and their attitudes.
Usability testing is largely a qualitative research technique. A usability test typically involves a test moderator and five to seven participants. These participants are made up of potential end users. The moderator gives the participants a series of tasks that they must perform with the design. These tasks are actions that an end user would carry out using the product. For example, we might ask a participant to navigate to a page in an application we are designing, or ask them to complete a form.
The moderator's role is to observe participants actions throughout the test. When the test is complete the moderator will analyse the results and report on points of interest that arose. Points of interest often include aspects of the design that caused problems for participants as well as parts of the design that participants found particularly useful. In the case of Amite, this helps the team to spot issues and potential problems before our Pay and Reward products are launched.
Why Carry out Usability Testing?
Carrying out regular usability testing allows design teams to find potentially serious problems at the early stages of a products development before coding begins.
When issues are identified early, they are less expensive to fix in terms of both the amount of man power and time required, both of which have an impact on a products release schedule.
Some of the things that you can find out from carrying out usability testing include:
How long end users take to complete task.
How satisfied end users are with your product.
Whether end users can navigate without frustration.
If there any functional problems with your product.
Whether the application aligned with end users goals.
When to Carry Out Usability Testing
Usability testing should be carried out across the whole life cycle of a project. At Amite we collect feedback direct from end users at various stages of the design and development process for any of our HR solutions. This means we can identify problems when they are usually easier and cheaper to fix.
A general rule of thumb for usability testing is to test as early and often as possible. We often use an early usability test to discover how people might comprehend the concept of a product as well as how their mental processes work while they use certain products. These early test are often conducted on prototypes. Prototypes tend to be low-fidelity (e.g. paper sketches), they are quick to produce and can easily be iterated upon.
As the product gets closer to release, we create more detailed high-fidelity designs and mock ups. At this later stage of a products development, the usability test we carry out are aimed more at evaluating the effectiveness of a product, tracking users reactions and the errors they make.
Conclusion
The main benefit of usability testing is to identify usability problems as early as possible. This means problems can be fixed before the design is implemented, massively reducing the risk associated with launching a new application or implementing new functionality to an existing product and attempting to mitigate any disruption.