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.