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• CodeAspire
• Jan 20, 2021

How to conduct mobile app user testing?

Mobile app development is the fastest growing segment in the mobile industry. Every reputable company already has an app or plans to design it. Ensuring good usability of newly developed software is extremely important before dreaming of around one million revenue.

Usability testing helps in finding the intentions and desires of users and fixing some poorly performing parts of a website or app and improving CRO based on the development of additional functionality. All of that already makes sense with usability testing for a website conducting on PC. But there are some difficulties when it comes to usability testing for mobile apps. How to test usability on mobile?

Apart from the application of appropriate techniques, which will be covered in the second part of this article, it is very important to prepare properly for testing. Such preparation involves the development of test logic and a lot of work with users. At the very least, you should explain to them what, how and why you are going to test. Let's take a closer look at how you design an effective usability test and what technologies are better to use to get qualitative behavioral insights and feedback from users.

Usability Testing VS User Experience Testing — what’s the difference?

The major usability testing and user experience testing  are two different methods of testing. And we need to understand their basics.

Usability is a way how a product can be used to reach the goals specified by users. The purpose of usability testing is to show how easy the product (app, website) is to use, understandable, whether it is able to effectively satisfy the needs of users.

User experience is the user's perception of the product (app, website). User experience testing involves measuring all key details of users' emotions, gaze movements, preferences, and behavior during and after product use.

To be successful with your product, you should focus on both usability testing and UX testing.

Who are your testers?

The more precise criteria you use to identify your target audience, the better. Age, occupation, education, cultural and religious background, geography, computer literacy, and many other factors can be used to identify the group of users you want to target in your test. The audience must be relevant to the product tested. For example, if you are testing a car-sharing app, elderly car owners in rural locations may not be your target audience while millennials working in creative industries and living in large urban settings may be better off .

According to several recent studies, we recommend inviting participants to participate in qualitative research - 5 people, 20 for quantitative - 20, for eye-tracking and facial coding - 40. If you have a test If you have enough time and resources, you can invite. more people. The larger the sample size, the more accurate the results are and the smaller the possibility of identifying interface issues that prevent users from effective interaction with it.

How to set the task for testers?

Clear objectives give clear and measurable results. This means that to see how users interact with the application, you need to ask them to do a specific task. You cannot just ask them to download the application and start using it. In this case, their experience will be very unpredictable and measured effectively. A task determined within the usability test must be accurate, actionable and contain no clues, which may facilitate its performance (and thus distort the test results by applying some logic of behavior to users Does).

1. Precise

2. Actionable

3. Raw

What you need for the usability/user experience testing?

The standard usability test is aimed at understanding whether the app / website is user-friendly to the target audience. The results of the tests are then transformed into insights that serve as guidance for the UX designer on how to improve the usability of websites or applications. If done properly, the test greatly increases the conversion of leads.

However, in the contemporary digital world, classic tools such as surveys are not enough to gain in-depth usability insights. Get such insights and effectively increase CRO you need to apply contemporary techniques, such as eye-tracking, emotion measurement, mouse tracking, and more.

Until recently, it was difficult to test mobile versions of websites and mobile applications. They were tested with the help of usable laboratories, which had many disadvantages - they were heavy, expensive and required a lot of time to install. A standard usability lab consisted of two webcams, one of which was fixed on a smartphone and interacted with the users' website / application interface, while the other person registered its face to register eye movements, emotions, etc. Was in front of. Even the above description of the testing process seems misleading, so you can imagine what kind of nightmare it was to analyze this diverse data. Nevertheless, thanks to the rapid development of neuroimarketing software in recent years, a number of user-friendly comprehensive testing solutions have appeared on the market, such as Eperion, Loop 11, Apaxiarens, Swerve, Appsey, Leanplum, and more. These solutions not only reduced time and required investment to test but also improved the quality of insights.