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Usability Testing
Testing Types - Purpose
Software usability testing is an example of non functional testing. Usability testing evaluates how easy a system is to learn and use. There are enormous benefits of the usability testing but still there is not much awareness about the subject.

Benefits of Usability testing can be summarized as

  • Its easier for sales team to sell a highly usable product.
  • Usable products are easy to learn and use.
  • Support cost is less for Usable products.
According to the ISO definition usability is the extent to which a product can be used by specified user to achieve specified goal with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.

It is very important to understand following before starting any Usability testing activities.

Specified User - Who will be the targeted user population. A usable system for a businessman could be highly unusable for the farmers. Targeted audience should be identified clearly.

Specified Goal - Usability testing team should understand the primary goal of the system. Usable system will rarely have fancy functionality, as it might be irrelevant to 80 percent of the user.

Effectiveness and Efficiency - These can be measured in terms of accuracy and completeness with which user achieve specified goals in minimum amount of time.

Context of Use -  It is very important to understand the context in which software will be used before usability testing. Usability testing of a video game will be different from a sophisticated software used by person in space shuttle.

Main crux of the usability testing is to make sure that end user can use the software with ease and can complete specified tasks effectively and efficiently. Usability testing can be divided into usability testing with user and without user.

Techniques like performance evaluation, card sorting and field studies are used to conduct usability testing when users are involved. It is very important to have representative users across all the categories during this testing.

When users are not available for the usability testing other techniques are used for usability testing. For example, Expert review, competitive analysis and keystroke level model analysis are some of the techniques used for usability testing.
 

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