An Overview on Usability Testing & 6 Tools to Automate It

Usability testing is one of the major Building block for the quality assurance process. This testing strategy can also be considered as classic example for the non-functional testing/Black box testing. Usability testing is mainly done to ensure the easiness and understability of  application/system. It is mainly performed from the user’s perspective. Usability testing reveals whether users feel comfortable to use your application or website based on some certain parameters such as the content of website, their navigation, their layout and website speed. Nowadays, the usability of the web page is very important and it is a very essential criterion for the survival. If a visitor to a site does not find it user-friendly, he/she will just bounce. So Usability testing plays a vital role in determining how easy user interfaces is to use.

Usability Testing Definition:

According to ISTQB Definition, Usability testing is done to determine the extent to which the software product/Application should be easy to understand, learn, operate and it should look attractive to the users, under specified conditions.

The main aim of usability testing is to identify any usability problems within the website, gather qualitative and quantitative data and establish the end-user’s fulfillment.

Usability testing show how people actually use a website & checks whether user is comfortable with that websites according to different parameters such as the flow, browsing and layout, speed and content of the website.

Usability testing checklist/Factors:

Usability testing can be performed on the factors like accessibility, readability, navigation, content, etc. Following are some sample checklist to test those factors.

A sample checklist, for testing the accessibility and readability of a website is:

• Check whether the website load time is realistic
• Check if font size & spacing between the texts is properly readable
• Check whether the Site is responsive or not, i.e. Works with different type of screen sizes with no horizontal scrolling options.

A sample checklist for testing the navigation and content of a website is:

• Check whether the navigation of website is easily understandable & simple
• Checks whether there exist any broken links
• Checks whether Navigation is consistent on every page.

A sample checklist for testing the Content of a website is:

• Check whether the contents are clearly readable, easily understood, Styles & Colors Are Consistent.
• Check whether the Contents within the website are useful and up-to-date.

Usability testing tools:

1. Usabilla tool for checking user experience

  Features of usabilla tool are as follows:

• Provide intuitive real time visual feedback so that the user can quickly receive their feedback.
• This tool help to gather feedbacks identify any usability issues helps to measure how various tasks perform, and then obtain the visual results of those task.
• Excellent Dashboard with so that user can easily get an aggregated overview of your feedback results.
• Excellent visual analysis with Multi-language support.
• By targeted slide-out messages, we can message user directly for feedback about a specific element, or pages.
• It mainly helps to measure the task performance and can be used in any device and cross platforms.

2. Juicy Studio tool for checking website readability

This freely available tool checks the readability of your website by just entering your url and can gain the readability scores. The contents is really considered as the heart of any website. So it should be easy to understand and internalize.  This tool also checks whether the fonts are easily readable, understandable. This tool helps us to quickly evaluate how much your website contents are readable.

3. Check My Colours tool for checking color choices

This freely available tool is yet another useful usability testing tool to test the contrast color of the foreground you have their against the sites background. For that you need to Paste your website URL and you will receive the test result regarding luminosity contrast ratio, brightness difference and color difference.

4. Browsershots tool for checking website accessibility

Accessibility is yet another important factor for usability testing. The website you created should be accessible to everyone, including the person with any disabilities. Cross-Browser/Cross-Platform Compatibility plays a vital role in usability testing. The website you created should be able to work in as many browsing situations as possible. Also the website you created should be responsive. So in order to automate this process there is a yet another usability tool to check whether the site is widely accessible by every single person. This type of tool helps you to perform cross browser testing without navigating towards multiple browsers. This free, open-source online application which helps testers, conveniently test their website’s browser compatibility in one place. Just like all other tool, You have to just enter the site url you want to test and need to choose the Browsers along with their versions and Platforms like windows,Mac,linux

5. Pingdom tools tool for checking website performance

Performance of site is yet another major factor in usability testing. User won’t stay along within the site, if website shows poor performance. It is imperative that you keep the website load speed below 3 seconds for enhanced user experience. You can resort to this guide: 8 Actionable Page Load Speed Improvements to achieve this task.

The user usually evaluates, how fast does it takes to load the entire webpage. Checks the size of webpage, in terms of file size. All users require the quick response from the website in order to complete their desired tasks.

This is yet another freely available usability tool to check the speed of website. This will display the load time of your web page and also display the performance grade based on several important factors. Like all other tools, you have to just specify the url of the website and then their corresponding test result will be displayed.

6. Dead Link checker tool for checking dead/broken links

 This is yet another freely available tool to check for the dead links within the websites. When user encounters any dead links within the site, it creates negative aspect or it damages user experience with the site. Like all other tool, users have to just specify their URL and can check your website in four different ways. This tool provides manual checking for single and entire page. W e can also retrieve the test results too.

Hence, such a usability testing always remains as an integral part for the success, mainly for the website. However, there are some important factors for usability testing so that you can test quantitatively to ensure whether your site is usable or not. In this Blog, I have mentioned some of those crucial factors like readability, performance, user experience, color choices and accessibility that affect usability and some tools in order to automate that process. Usability testing ensures better performance and a standard website. Usability testing is considered as a wide area of testing and it also requires a fairly good level of understanding. People who are involved in the usability testing require some capabilities like patience, ability to listen to all suggestions, open mind to welcome any sort of ideas. Above all, they should possess good observation skills to identify the issues and fix them properly.

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