[UX Framework] What is Usability Test? Why is it so important in Product Development?

🌟 Usability testing is the practice of testing how easy a design is to use with a group of representative users. 🌟 🔸 The Secret to Building Products That Users Love Why do usability testing? → It reduces the risk of building the wrong product. If done right early, usability testing can help you spot problems when they are still easy and cheap to fix, saving you loads of money, time, and resources. The mistake I’ve made most often is saying yes to a client’s feature request — the product I worked on ends up as a Frankenstein of different platforms merged together. • Do you want a dashboard? Ok. • How about a chat interface? Sure. • A Kanban board? Yea… why not. And this was a bad idea. The more things a user can do, the more complicated the product is. We ended up shutting the project down early and never going to market. Why? Because it was not user-friendly. The success of every product in the market is dependent on the user’s experience with that product and usability testing can help ensure the product you are building is convenient to use and easy to learn. 🔸 The Importance of Usability in Product Development Usability testing involves observing users as they try to complete tasks, often conducted repeatedly from early development until a product’s release. During these tests, designers and stakeholders will try to understand certain behaviours and patterns and provide actionable recommendations to improve the usability of your product. This test aims to ensure the plan for a product’s functions, features and purpose aligns with what users want by observing how real-life people use the product. Yes, the design of your product should be visually appealing but if your user experience sucks, then it has failed to fulfil its role to meet customer needs. Usability testing is largely a qualitative research technique and is not driven by statistics like surveys where lots of people participate. Usability testing is done using a small set of people, usually five to seven. If you are interested in reading, check out my blog for a step-by-step guide to Usability Tests & How Google are the Jedi’s of usability since 1988 Link: https://uxplaybook.org/articles/how-to-ux-usability-test