Effective Usability Testing for Customer Experience Optimization
For creating a suitable web or mobile application for your business the primary aspect is to optimize the overall look and feel of the app. The core purpose is to ensure a supreme customer experience that should be maintained from the moment they visit your page or website till the time they plan to checkout. Ease of navigation and quick availability of all necessary features determines whether the customer will buy your product or switch into a potential lead in the near future.
According to the most recent statistics, everything from the visual graphics to the tiniest details, such as where the buy now button should be placed, all contribute to satisfying the customers to a future prospect and fall under the umbrella of overall customer experience optimization. It’s critical for your company’s success to address all of these graphic concerns as soon as possible.
“For every dollar spent to resolve a problem during product design, $10 would be spent on the same problem during development, and multiply to $100 or more if the problem had to be solved after the product’s release.” — Roger Pressman, Author of Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach
It can also be noted here, that a great customer experience is important to hold up the brand value of any business. The moment a business owner chooses to create his online presence via a web or mobile application, his website or app becomes the sole representative of his business to his customers. Imagine you come across a company website selling digital designing and development services with the worst UI/UX configurations. Would you be willing to hire them for their digital services? No. To ensure your own business does not fall under this experience trap, most companies opt for outsourcing usability testing services effectively clubbed with the UI/ UX testing of an application.
The above scenario was also a small example of how customer experience optimization can have a major role to play for your business applications online. Let’s have a closer look at what customer experience optimization is and how businesses can utilize usability testing to enhance their experiences online.
What is Customer Experience Optimization?
It’s the way businesses portray themselves on the digital platform. The way businesses mold their overall visual experience on the digital platform to increase their conversion rates, lifetime business value, and customer brand loyalty for their businesses online. There used to be a time when most businesses thought that having a unique business idea, product or innovative solution was the only way to be a differentiator in the market. Customer experience optimization states that a clear distinction can lie in experiences that are seamless and omnichannel for the users and can help be that differentiating factor.
So, what are these experiences?
In the simplest of terms, experience is the quality of interaction between an individual and an element, where an element can be anything — a brand, a website, its products, services, a message, an email, a notification, or even an individual.
What is optimization?
Optimization, on the other hand, refers to making relevant changes. It means striking the right balance between a user’s expectations and a company’s business goals.
Experience + optimisation = Experience Optimization
Clubbing both of these terms together we get Experience Optimization that involves ensuring any user experiences the most attractive website journey starting from the moment they click on your website. It’s an art form that ensures we create an environment that is both welcoming and time-worthy. Once you were successfully able to transform a user into a satisfied visitor, the chances of them converting into and potential lead and showcasing deeper brand loyalty increases to a significant percent.
What is Usability Testing?
Usability testing is an essential part of the UI/UX designing and research process wherein you evaluate the features of your application on a set group of users (technically referred to as crowdsource testing) to test if the assumptions you made for that product’s functionality, intuitive to use and deemed high quality by the actual users or not.
In this experience optimization technique, the user must be given a specific task in hand in a closed environment under controlled observation. As a result, you closely observe their body language, expressions, and response to every other projected stimulus during their interaction with your product. This helps you get real-world testing data and feedback about your product before its launch in the market. It helps you identify issues that need to be fixed well before time.
What are the Benefits of Testing your Product in Front of your Target Audience?
There could be multiple benefits of leveraging the latest usability testing techniques to test your applications at hand. Given below are a few benefits of usability testing that can help any business in their testing process:
1. Unbiased Real User Feedback
Usability testing allows you to validate your product’s user experience and satisfaction, identify critical functional issues and optimize your product’s specifications supported by real user feedback regularly.
2. Reduced Defect Rate
Usability testing helps reduce defect rates early in the testing cycle because of the increased collaboration between the development, QA, and operations teams that helps fix loopholes faster and reduce post-production defects to a great extent.
3. Customer Behaviour Analysis
The analysis shared towards the end of usability testing is more accurate because it shares a clear view of your users’ experience with your application as opposed to their personal preference. It examines every user’s behavior and allows them the liberty to perform tasks in their natural environment without being influenced by any dominant personality opinion.
4. Enhanced Performance
Have early-stage feedback to get a realistic opinion of what your users think about your application or product in use. These users will be able to help identify loopholes in your application and identify the areas that need changes before its scheduled release. Moreover, early usability testing can help your company balance the requirements of your potential customers along with aligning the business goals and strategies with your application.
5. Testing Across Different Devices
Crowdsource testing, a testing method used by many leading software testing companies while testing the usability of their applications use real-world situations with real-time devices to closely mimic how real users will be interfacing with your mobile app or website. Your ideal CX testing experts will test an application on multiple devices to see how the user’s behavior has changed over channels of the same product.
Tips on Effective Usability Testing Techniques
With all these reasons to implement usability testing as a comprehensive customer experience optimization technique, you may now be wondering how to go about it yourself. We have three recommendations to share for any usability testing project:
1. Create an effective testing plan
Identify which type of usability testing would your company like to move forward with. Determine the objectives, questions you need to get answered, tasks, and other strategies before moving forward
2. Choose the right participants
Choosing the right set of participants that will be involved in testing your application is the most essential step to be considered here. Your participants should be a group of users who will be representing your target audience. Work on constructing the right user personas to get the required results here.
3. Create inadept analysis reports
Consolidate all your observations from your tests, collect recordings and CCTV footage to create comprehensive reports towards the end of your test. Make sure you include both quantitative and qualitative responses collected in the report, such as user quotations, success and failure rates of the tasks in hand, minute observations, SUS scores, and a list of actionable items that can be improved upon based on feedback.
To Conclude
As previously stated, providing the best client experience possible through your web and mobile applications is the backbone of your company. With multiple homogeneous service providers in the business, this does help in ensuring a competitive advantage in the market. The process of delivering such an experience is straightforward to understand, but it might be difficult if you are new to the industry.
Here, usability testing is a critical step for your enterprise to be able to deliver the ease of access your customers require for using your product. A smart approach is to get in touch with a reliable usability testing provider that offers a complete portfolio of usability testing services fulfilled through strategic go-to-market partnerships. It is high time you get in the game to make your business graph pacing upwards!
