Usability Testing

In software development, there are three general phases that must be completed in order to have a good product. The first phase is planning. In the planning phase a client specifies the requirements for what they want. Usually the client and the company developing this new product discuss what is reasonable to have and what can be done, this is called the requirements analysis. Once the client and developers agree on the requirements the second phase can commence. The second phase is implementation, testing and documentation. This phase mostly just involves the developers depending on how they go about testing. Lastly, the third phase is deployment and maintenance. In this phase the software is (hopefully) finished and ready to be distributed. Maintenance is done until the end of the product life span which can be a few months to a few years.

Software Development LIfe Cycle

In this post we will discuss one phase in particular, the second phase which involves testing, but more specifically usability testing. Usability testing is a somewhat formal way of testing a product before implementation begins. This process is usually started by drafting up prototypes on paper or on a computer of what the software looks like and certain features of it. Any person will be ok for this process, although it might be useful to use someone who might want to use the product that is being worked on.

Test admin writing comments

The paper prototypes are then used to administer the usability test. One of the developers gives the user a task to do and observes how the user goes about finishing this task. After a good amount of tasks are completed the test is over and the developer can now gain insight as to what should change if anything.

My team and I have done and administered usability tests for an application that we are developing and we gained useful insights. This helped us redesign our front end before we began implementation (saved us some time and work).


So you see, usability testing can go a long way, and it most definitely cuts back the time of re-implementing the design of a product.