How to Test User Experience
User experience (UX) involves the range of emotions a user feels while using a product or service. The product or service may have amazing features and capabilities, but if it fails to delight the user, the person will hardly use it. United Airlines is setting an aspirational target for its customers' UX. It's striving to create an in-flight experience that is “legroom friendly," "online friendly," and "shut-eye friendly.”
Understanding how users feel involves becoming aware of man-machine interactions. This knowledge then can be used to improve the overall user experience. Sadly, many of those who talk about UX as though it’s a set of tools and approaches often forget about the human side of products. A range of tests can be performed while a user is engaging with a piece of software to ensure that the user is never forgotten at any point of the development process.
Emotional Response Test
Users don’t have scripts to follow in one hand while using a product or service in the other hand. By probing users and recording their emotions, ranging from amusement to annoyance, UX teams and testers can gather invaluable information about what makes a product great—and what makes it a nuisance.
User experience professional Robert Hoekman Jr. has a list of tenets on the value of user experience strategy. One of the tenets is "A user’s experience belongs to the user. An experience cannot be designed. It can, however, be influenced. A designer’s job is to be the influencer."
First Impressions Test
What can you tell about people or websites in a short time? A lot. Tests like the Five Second test show that student evaluations given after the students are shown only a few seconds of video are indistinguishable from evaluations from students who actually had the professor for an entire semester. Additionally, visual appeal, navigation, and click tests give inputs about users’ early impressions of products and websites, which can be used to understand what makes a delightful user experience.
User Pain Points
What truly delights users is implicit most times. Bill Gates was absolutely correct when he remarked that unhappy customers are a great source of information for learning about UX. You can gather user pain points from complaints and warnings by talking to users more often and by observing them using websites and software, and then recording their emotions. These days, it’s easy to get customer feedback at the drop of a hat through social media.
As Steve Jobs said, design is "not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Testers can use a variety of heuristics to tell the UX team what does and doesn’t work for users so that the entire project team knows exactly what gives their customers the greatest experience possible.
