Usability Testing- A irreplaceable practice

As we all know testing means to examine the application and find out the loopholes in the product as per the requirement. Usability testing is a type of testing in which the product or the software is tested by the experts. This  practice is unavoidable and irreplaceable because it gives the direct review of the real users how they are going to use the system.

In this testing cycle, a team of experts take on the system where they do the user interaction of the system. During this procedure a list of bugs is maintained such that it can be worked upon later. In this way the human made product is tested such that it meets the requirement of user is a user friendly manner. It is mostly conducted with the web applications, mobile apps, softwares, documents, devices etc. It basically measures the ease of use of a software application.

For example, If there is a webpage with a button placed on right side and it is a very important button. Than in testing results it may be concluded to place the button on center rather then on right because the center part of the screen gains more focus of the user. Also, lets say there is a registration form on the page and the submit button only handles action when mouse button is clicked over it, but this should't be the only case for the user. The submit button should also capture the click from the keyboard and not just from mouse. The pro user feels more comfortable when the flow gets connected such he does not have to change his input interfaces.

The goals of  usability testing

The usability testing technique comes under the technique of black box testing technique. And it aims at discovering the error as per users prospective and suggesting the improvement.  It mainly focuses on the areas of accuracy,  performance, recall and emotional response.

These terms can be broadly elaborates as follows:

Accuracy: how many mistakes the user has made? were those mistakes able to be recovered with right information?. How fetal were those errors were to the user?

Performance: How many steps and how much time did it take to complete the basis task?

Recall: Is the user able to recall things after a time of much use?

Emotional response: How comfortable was the user with this system? Did he like it? Will he be recommending this system or application to others?

As stated in the above image strip, the system asked the user to press any key but since we can make out the the system required n for no and y for yes. But since the system was not able to instruct the user well he pressed any other key ('A' here in this case), the system suffered some other results.

Techical Blogs - A Tale of technical enthusiast

The world today is driven by technology. Things are going automated thus reducing human labor. The knowledge in the technical arena is growing in exponential. This knowledge needs to be spread and one of most common source of spreading is and promoting are the technical blogs.

Technical Blogs are the blogs which are related to technology like machines, programmings, Software, Applications, Technical Languages, Open source community or anything that requires some technique to solve some of the world's tougher problems. Like if I talk about simple windows or any particular operating system installed on computer that can handle so many tasks and provides a interface between the hardware and other application level software. Its been such a discovery that it changed the course of machines i.e. how machine can perform a particular task as trained by human, is achieved through this operating system. Sometimes simpler ideas involves the biggest of problems solved at its abstract level.

Talking about Email, see how inconvenient it used to be when people just had only mode of communication was USPS i.e. United States Postal Service or The Royal Postal Service of London to send a message from USA to London and vice versa. Now today with simple convenience of email. Just type the mail id on the email client type the message you want to send and bingo message is delivered in even less than a second.

The life is faster so as the mode of communication also, with text messaging service or social media application like facebook, whatsapp  etc, People are connected to each other in the quickest of possible ways and making life moving with quite a high pace. Sharing has been a problem in recent times and even it is right now but technology today has been able to solve these big issues to a great extent. we are habitual of these services and this awe-striking technology, if even for a day we are stolen away from it we start feeling so depressed for unfulfilled. We are surrounded by technology and its a fact that currently each and every person is technology driven.

The blogs on the internet has taken a very effective participation on enriching the knowledge among individuals about technology. Not only it benefits the public reading the blog but also gives challenge to the person writing it to be well prepared before presenting it in front of the world. Oh, Common the world is going to read it, technology attracts everyone not necessary if he is belonging to technical background or not (by this I am talking about engineers, scientist and mathematicians). Technical blogs makes a persons mind open to think out of the box as well and give a collective summary of the knowledge that he owns. So you see in a way these blogs become a social media of idea sharing and imparting knowledge of what you have.