Introduction
Usability testing is a must have software testing technique which is more of an advice from the end user to make a robust software design. An organization depending on its requirement can choose any of the technique to fulfill usability testing in order to yield a high quality software product. is conducted to ensure high quality software product to the end user. It ensures that software is performing well and fit to use by the end user post production. Often usability testing is ignored in the software testing world but it is a must have kind of testing which directly impacts the software quality and projects to meet the highest standard based on the future perspective. Usability testing can reduce the cost of project as it will mitigate the need of patching, or frequent bug fixes which otherwise remained unveiled and caught later in the production.
Usability testing can unveil many defects and detect problems in the software before they can be diagnosed by testing team or reported by the end user. Usability testing can easily be merged with integration testing and there an organization can fetch the combined benefits of both kind of testing in a very less time and ensuring the high quality of the software products. Usability testing is essential from the business reputation point of view as well. This is because nobody in the market desires a buggy product instead everybody embrace a stable and high quality end product.
The following are the best usability testing methods which are recommended to be used on a regular basis in order to ensure high quality software product.
CARD SORTING Technique:
It is one of the inexpensive method and used widely in the industry. It is a very effective method used for usability testing and design. In this technique, a special deck of cards is created by the project team where each card has details about specific topic related to the requirements and conception of the end user about the software product. Here, the end users are asked to analytically organize the cards based on their past experiences with a similar kinds of software products. Such tasks should be repeated by different end users’ multiple times in order to ensure alternative ideas.
After analysis has completed from the end users, they are expected to provide explanation about the choices made by them. The card sorting technique helps the project team to conceptualize the best design based on the inputs provided by the targeted end users. Such technique is very adaptable and fit to use at any stage of the software development life cycle.
COGNITIVE WALK-THROUGH Technique:
In this technique, a group of skillful developers or end users are tasked to analyze every possible condition provided by a software in a step by step approach as the process continues. Each of the step is analyzed thoroughly by the expert team and they create the success stories and the failure stories based on all of the possible scenarios. Lastly, the entire project team make a joint analysis to study why the success story has succeeded and why the failure story has failed. This input provides a clear picture towards the maximum usability based on every possible outcome.
HEURISTIC EVALUATION Technique:
The heuristic evaluation technique is as good as peer review. In this technique, a group of expert developers test the software interfaces in order to unveil the design issues based on their past experiences. These expert developers access the software interfaces, measure the usability, and conclude about the efficiency of the software interfaces based on the important benchmarks such as software interface compatibility with real-life problems and circumstances, using well-established signs and vocabulary, flexibility, capability for users to solve problems without any assistance from the technical support, software interface consistency, etc.
This method is quite expensive as it requires recruitment of experts’ developers who are employed specifically for the usability testing but this is one of the most reliable method recommended for the usability testing. This technique is widely practices in larger organizations where software quality is the key goal in order to maintain the organization reputation world wide.
PARTICIPATORY DESIGN Technique:
The participatory design technique allows the end users to directly participate into the software development process. Here, a group of expert archetypical end users are selected by the development team based of the project interfaces benchmarks. These end users act as consultants and provide their feedback throughout the development process. These consultants specify their requirements as the end users, raises alarm if they find the software interface inappropriate, access the aspects of the end software product in the real time. Not only this, these expert end users deliver from time to time their innovative ideas and share their perspective in order to create compatible user interfaces for the software product.
The end design suggested by the consultants and approved by the expert developers is the most efficient design for the software product which yields a very high quality software product. Such technique is widely practiced when the software is designed for a particular profession. E.g. in a banking application which has the online trading module need to be designed. Such module can be designed in the best way with the help of the traders’ inputs because the traders being the end users knows well about their requirements and perspectives to use the trading module into their day to day life and therefore the traders’ participation in the banking software development is the must.
TASK ANALYSIS Technique:
In this technique, the steps are observed which are taken by the end users in order to reach a certain goal using a software product. Such technique provides the developers an idea about the end users requirements and they can learn to implement the exact end goals required by the end user to use the current software in hand. After analyzing the complete task, there is always a scope to improve the over all steps that constitutes an end goal and same can be incorporated into the software under development. This technique is applicable to any software development stage. It is highly effective and very comprehensive technique as it does not need a lot of time and resources to analyze the complete scenario and design the software system.
Conclusion
Usability testing is a must have software testing technique which is more of an advice from the end user to make a robust software design. An organization depending on its requirement can choose any of the technique to fulfill usability testing in order to yield a high quality software product.
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