Users often struggle to navigate through apps, not because the app’s interface is bad but because the navigation pathways aren’t tested. That’s where usability testing becomes useful to app developers.

Usability testing is a crucial step in the product development process, especially we’re speaking of apps. In this article, we’ll understand what usability testing is, its benefits, and a step-by-step guide on how to do it.

What is Usability Testing?

Usability testing is a broad type of user research that focuses on how a user interacts with, navigates, and uses your app. This testing allows you to find aspects of improvement so that your app is easy-to-use.

In usability testing, you want answers to questions like:

Can users easily navigate through your app?
Are there any bugs that impact the user’s ability to complete a task?
How path do users take to complete a task? Is this path the most efficient in the app?
How quickly are users able to complete their tasks?

Usability testing generally follows are process: Define your audience and test goals, find participants and get them to complete a set of tasks, and then analyze the findings. It is a thorough process that must be repeated to get accurate results.

What Makes Usability Testing Different Than Other Testing Types?

Usability testing can often be confused with user testing, A/B testing, and user acceptance testing. Although they’re all closely related, they aren’t exactly the same.

Let’s explore what makes usability testing different.

User testing vs. Usability testing

User testing is a broad term that refers to collecting user feedback. It can include various aspects such as UX testing, general user feedback, or other comprehensive user tests.

Usability testing, on the other hand, is a type of user testing that focuses on a specific aspect of it, and that is the usability of your product.

A/B testing vs. Usability testing

A/B testing is a form of quantitative testing that measures your users’ preferences for specific design and app components. It is focused on how to improve the app’s performance.

Usability testing is a type of qualitative testing that focuses on understanding how a user interacts with the product. It is more about simplifying the app’s workflows for users.

Unlike A/B testing where you’d measure which elements users like the most, usability testing helps you understand where they get stuck and how simple the task is for them. You can see that usability testing is more focused on users.

User acceptance testing vs. Usability testing

User acceptance testing (UAT) is mostly the end step after all the other types of testing have been completed. It ensures that your app or product finally meets all the user requirements before launch.

The user acceptance testing ensures that the workflows and all the app screens are working as intended. While it is more about the product itself, usability testing ensures the user’s experience of navigating through the app is smooth.

6 Benefits of Usability Testing

With app development, it’s highly probable for flaws to go unnoticed. Since you’re so familiar with the app as you design it, you can easily overlook it. That’s why usability testing is a crucial step to make your app actually ‘usable’ for users.

Let’s discuss 6 major benefits of usability testing for mobile apps:

1. Reduced development costs

The sooner you can resolve problems and make iterations in the development process, the higher costs you can save on. Usability testing in early stages can help validate your product. Since the product is still flexible, you can make iterations at minimal costs.

2. Developed user empathy

Developers and builders often get so immersed into the app that they forget who they’re building it for: the users. You can lose the vision of your product’s goals. Usability testing makes it easier for you to understand your users’ needs, perspectives, and processes.

Consider an example: You know exactly where to find other app screens but if your users don’t, usability testing can reveal that menus aren’t intuitive. Such flaws are overlooked, even though they greatly impact user experience.

3. Combat cognitive biases

When you use your app, you already know every visual flow and that can lead to cognitive bias. Usability testing makes you observe what actual users are doing on your app. It can give you clarity on how to design for them and not based on your false premises.

In addition, it’s possible for the iterations you’ve made with user feedback aren’t implemented well. You can eliminate such errors too, with usability testing.

4. Increased product accessibility

You need to ensure that your product is accessible to everyone. In your product’s usability testing, include users with physical, visual, auditory, and cognitive needs and test in every way possible.

For example, you can increase your app’s color contrast to help with visually impaired users. But at the same time, the feature can keep your app functional in harsh sunlight and on smaller screens. You need to view from every point of view for this.

5. Prioritize necessary changes

There are countless number of tasks when developing an app. It can make it confusing for your team to prioritize which features and iterations to work on. Usability testing provides clear data on where users are struggling the most. Hence, your team can easily prioritize the necessary tasks.

6. Identify and simplify complex workflows

In apps with multi-step processes and visual flows, there’s a possibility of the process being more complex than it needs to be. Usability testing can help you find errors and make these complex workflows intuitive and easy to navigate.

How to Perform Usability Testing in 7 Steps?

Now that we know the basics of usability testing, let’s understand how you can do it from scratch in 7 steps.

1. Define your goal and target audience

Usability testing is completed in different rounds. Start by defining your goals for this particular round of usability testing. Keep your goal specific and focused to get the most defined results.

Ask yourself questions to define your goal, such as:

What are you trying to evaluate with the users?
Do you understand your target audience?

Even if you’re sure of the results, testing with real users can clear cognitive biases and help you create your product’s best version possible. You want to ensure that you collect feedback from every type of user.

2. Create an evaluation criteria

Once you’ve created your test’s goal, you need to define an evaluation criteria for it. This is important for you to be able to measure whether the test was a success or a failure.

Common metrics to evaluate usability testing include:

Task completion rate
Time on task
Number of errors
User satisfaction score
Misclick rate

Choose your metrics based on your goal. You can also relate your goal with the metric and clarify everything for the users.

3. Create the roadmap

Next, you want to create a roadmap for the actual usability test round. A good testing plan typically consists of:

The instructions the moderator will give
The tasks users will perform
Specific metrics that the observer will note
Question the moderator will ask during the test

As you plan these questions, you also need to plan how you will conduct the testing. Define the methods you’ll use and the mode of conduction. Include the length of the test as well.

4. Run a pilot test

A pilot test confirms that your test is clear and effective before you actually start running it. Find someone who doesn’t know about your product. For instance, if you choose a developer, it’s easier to miss unclear areas of the roadmap.

With the pilot test, aim to evaluate every aspect of your test: the methods, the clarity of your questions, the tasks, and more. If there’s anything ineffective, you can fix it before you start gathering real data.

5. Find testing participants

With your testing methods and roadmap in place, you can now find testing participants. There are several ways to find testing participants, such as:

Your existing users
Your website or email list
A research or user testing panel
Online surveys

When recruiting testing participants, it’s best to test a wide segment of your target audience first. You should look for people from various backgrounds, experience levels, and preferences.

This will help you filter out the people whose feedback is actually useful. If you test fewer participants frequently, you can get better results than a larger audience.

You want to ensure that the participants have given explicit consent to use whatever information you gather from them to improve your product. Inform them if you’ll be sharing any of their responses with the wider team, and how their data will be used.

6. Gather data and analyze your findings

After the testing process, you need to analyze all the quantitative and qualitative data to gather insights and report on your findings.

This analysis can include factors such as:

Summary of the usability test metrics
Optimal path analysis
Common question responses
Recordings and videos

Analyze the collected data thoroughly to develop clear results and share them further. These findings can help you decide how to move forward with the optimizations for your product.

7. Experiment and improve

In usability testing, there is no ‘end’ line. You always have to take your findings from the test and revise, iterate, and experiment on future tests. Over time, you can conduct new tests to analyze and understand what works best.

Bottom Line

Usability testing is a strategic move that can improve your app’s user experience and strengthen the product-market fit. To ensure that your tests are effective, you must run tests, analyze, and experiment repeatedly.

You can test the usability of your apps built with Natively using Expo Go. The platform allows you to test native apps in various ways. To test yours, you can scan the QR code next to the app’s interface in the AI builder.

It takes less than a day to build and test native apps now, thanks to AI app generation. Build an app on your idea and test it today!