What is Usability Testing?
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The year was 2004. I was 21 years old.
It was my first day working at a big consulting firm. In my 2-piece black suit, I met my new manager in a big, bright lobby—one that was shared by three gigantic buildings. It seemed so mighty and I was proud to be there, fresh out of school with my sparkling new marketing degree.
As we rode the elevator, my manager added, “We’re excited you’re going to be our new usability expert.”
I stared back blankly, not wanting to disappoint, but had to say it… “Usa-what?”
He reached into his bag and pulled out a thin book—Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. “It’s not long. It has pictures. You have a client meeting at 2:30, but by then, you’ll know more than they do.”
Over a decade later as a UX Director at that same big consulting firm, I told that story to Steve Krug over dinner. By then I had actually earned that title of “usability expert”—though by that time, it was called “user experience.” The industry figured out that it’s not just about whether someone CAN use your site or app—it’s about whether they WILL.
Regardless of what it’s called today, usability testing is a key form of research designed to understand how a visitor interacts with a product, and how well they can complete what they set out to do.
Most usability testing contains “scenarios” where we ask participants to walk us through a set of tasks they’re trying to accomplish. We ask participants to speak out loud as they navigate, telling the researcher what they’re doing and thinking, as if they are narrating a YouTube tutorial video.
One key difference between an interview question and a scenario-based question is that scenarios ask people to DO something, to perform a task.
Usability testing is looking to evaluate the user experience of a system. I usually like to break this down into a few key categories:
Navigation - the organization, information architecture, and how you get around the site or app
Presentation - the images, photos, and overall layout.
Content - whether the content is valuable to your audience and presented in an easy-to-understand way for that specific user
Interaction - how users touch, move, spin, click, search, or otherwise engage with a digital product.
Trust - what signals a user is looking at to really know if they can rely on you, your products, your services. These signals may appear in visuals, video, messaging, interactions, or even the existence of specific features
If you're trying to figure out how someone uses a digital product and if specific scenarios yield positive experiences for them, usability testing is a powerful qualitative technique for your research toolbox.
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For more training on usability testing as well as other market research techniques, check out my courses on LinkedIn Learning!
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Sarah Weise is the CEO of award-winning marketing research agency Bixa and the bestselling author of InstaBrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Generation Z. For 15 years, Sarah has been a guide to hundreds of leading brands including Google, IBM, Capital One, Mikimoto, PBS, and U.S. Army, to name a few. Sarah helps brands achieve a laser-focus on their customers and build experiences that are downright addictive. She lectures at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business and speaks at conferences and corporate events worldwide.