Usability Testing

Take your questions to your users in a usability lab

Usability testing is the most popular research technique in use in industry today. We have helped many corporate organizations establish in-house usability labs at their facilities. The power of usability testing is that it offers live observation of user behavior. It's hard to argue with usability issues when you've watched your customers struggle, first hand.Seeing users in a live setting as they succeed and fail with your design is powerful, overshadowing web analytics, expert reviews or any other analytical data. If you want to understand, watch your users: listen and observe first hand!

Benefits:

• The power of the one-way mirror! Usability testing is the ultimate listening machine.
• Usability testing can help you quickly resolve design issues that might otherwise be over-analyzed in your team meetings. The practitioners mantra is "Let's test it with users!"
• Senior management can rapidly learn what usability is and why it is important to fund, support and empower User Experience in the organization. Usability testing is the de-facto technique for evangelizing usability.
• Live usability testing pulls together developers, marketers, executives and business people together to collaboratively interpret design issues, problems and questions- all from the end-users experience.
• Usability testing allows design and development teams to check and fix issues and assumptions with navigation, functionality and even brand perception and subjective satisfaction (A must for testing AJAX, a new approach for web applications).

Usability Testing Options:

1. Single Usability Test. Test your website or application before launch or as part of early "beta" stage development. Usability testing is best conducted early on to allow for cost effective design iteration. Recommended.

• Testing involves 8-20 users
• 1-1.5 hours sessions
• 15-20 day turn-around time
• Competitive usability testing (adds additional cost with significant insight).
• Format: Online (remote) usability testing; low-fidelity usability testing (html throw-away site); high-fidelity (beta site or current production site or application).

2. Lifecycle Usability Testing: One usability test per quarter or as project life-cycle dictates (up to 4 full tests included)

• Get this testing package if you are establishing a lab or are expecting to do a lot of testing over the next 12-18 months (Saves $15K on overall investment).

3. Competitive Usability Testing: Test your site against the usability of two competitors. Learn from their mistakes and make your site better based on their user experience flaws.

• Many companies use competitor data to develop or refine their products. This is learning from the mistakes of others at its finest. Do competitive testing if you need to strategically differentiate your product from that of your competitors.

Related Product: Experience Dynamics' Portable Usability Lab

There is a joke among usability practitioners: usability lab and usability testing software is difficult to use! Can you image struggling while you are taking notes of somebody struggling? The ultimate insult.The problem with existing lab vendors is they are not usability engineers themselves or do not know enough about video technology or what is actually required for optimal note taking during testing. We have solved this problem by teaming with video specialists to simplify portable lab technology.

We currently rent our portable usability labs and provide custom development of labs if you would like to purchase one. If you are interested in portable lab rental or would like to purchase your own lab, fill in our Inquiry Form and we will reply to you promptly.

Visit the Usability Lab Rental website.

Usability Lab Renal offers portable usability labs for rent, or fixed custom usability labs for stationery usability testing set-up; or for anyone who wants to conduct professional usability tests with our Experience Capture Studio user testing software or portable labs.