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In March, I went to the STP Conference in New Orleans and gave a talk about measuring usability and user experience (UX). One of the hot topics in the conference was mobile quality assurance and mobile testing issues. And, of course that came up in my session. How to define and measure mobile UX and how to do mobile usability testing? I discussed several usability and UX modeling and measurement models that could be applied directly to mobile usability. One of the models was based on logging user activity and determining if they completed tasks. If a user can complete a task easily, or learn how to complete a task easily, this is critical. Learning is especially important for mobile applications because we are using them on the go, in our car, and don’t have time to learn. We want to be able to use the full capabilities of the app in minutes or even seconds.
Usability Testing and Measurement
We’ve been working in doing some usability measurement for mobile and some of the data we find is that for multi-step processes/tasks, if we measure those that started and completed each step, then we can get an idea of what screens or parts of the task have UX issues. Here is a table from our study:
usability testing multi-step task completion
As you can see, based on this, we can get a good look at where there are potential problems and therefore go into that task – step to see where the problem is. This is an easy way to do some quick mobile usability testing and claim low hanging fruit to improve the user experience. Of course once, we go there, and look at the potential problems, that is another subject!
