- As your design team builds a design, it's useful to test various aspects of it with customers, when possible, to see if the design is easy and pleasant to use, and ensure that your customer can complete tasks the tester gives them with the design.
- User researchers and prototypers will work together to perform this testing.
- Tools:
+ UserTesting, which lets you get videos of random people that meet specified criteria performing tasks with your website, mobile apps, or prototype
+ UsabilityHub, which provides data including heat maps about how people perform tasks with your static mockups across different categories, help simplify this task.
- So the key questions you're trying to ask with the usability testing of prototypes, is:
+ Does the design allow the customer to achieve their goals?
+ Do then achieve them efficiently, meaning that it's easy and timely?
+ Can they do this effectively, meaning did they achieve their desired outcome?
+ And with that design, are you minimizing irrelevance, removing unneeded complexity and avoiding any unintended consequences?
- At the end of the day, the user researchers and prototypers are collaborating to perform this testing to empathize with customers, to fix user experience issues, to speed product development, and ultimately to create a better product experience.
