Leveraging Usability-Testing Data in Making UX Design Decisions

Delivering User Satisfaction

Usability-testing data can help you make the necessary improvements to a user interface, enabling you to offer a hassle-free experience to your target audience. Thus, users can effortlessly access relevant information through your platform and complete their desired actions with ease. The result is higher user satisfaction, fewer complaints, and less negative feedback from users after launch.

Achieving High Conversion Rates

Insights from usability testing can help you identify your target audience’s painpoints, preventing obstacles to their transitions from one stage of the customer journey to the next. Using this data, you can design an easy-to-use interface that attracts new users and engages a relevant audience. Because users are able to access the required information and perform their desired actions with ease, you’ll likely achieve high conversion rates and exponential growth in the long run.

Making Informed Design Decisions

Usability testing can help you make data-driven design decisions rather than simply relying on your intuition. Based on the feedback you receive from users, you’ll be able to offer better features, optimize design elements, and improve the navigation structure. By helping you make design changes on the basis of relevant insights that reflect users’ expectations of how they’ll interact with the platform, the testing process can eliminate subjective biases and allow you to embrace a data-driven approach to making critical decisions.

Creating a Competitive Edge

The data that you collect through usability testing can help you outmaneuver your competition and build a platform that stands out in the marketplace. Optimizing the platform to meet the needs and expectations of your target audience also cultivates customers’ loyalty and fuels positive word-of-mouth. Thus, investing in usability testing can give you a competitive advantage. Companies that invest in optimizing their user experience gain a return on investment (ROI) of up to $100 for every $1 they invest.

Ensuring Operational Efficiency

Usability-testing data can help you achieve greater operational efficiency. The testing process lets you identify any problems earlier in the development process, so you can swiftly make the necessary adjustments. The resulting insights let you maximize your operational efficiency, saving you time, costs, and resources.

Implementing Usability-Testing Data

Now that you know how important it is to collect usability-testing data, let’s consider the significance of implementing your findings from usability testing in your decision-making.

Set Clear Goals

Setting clear objectives is a prerequisite for implementing usability-testing data in making design decisions. You need to identify and evaluate the platform’s problem areas. Setting clear goals helps you ask the right questions of participants when conducting usability-test sessions. You can potentially access many insights by conducting a usability study. Knowing your goals enables you to narrow your focus and identify the core areas that you want to improve. Your goals act as your roadmap. Without knowing what you want to accomplish or identifying the key areas of concern, the volume of insights might overwhelm you and disrupt your decision-making process.

Conduct a Usability Study

Once you’ve set clear goals, the next step is preparing to conduct a usability study to ensure that you gather useful data from participants. There are different methods of usability testing that you might try, as depicted in Figure 1.

Image source: Infragistics

Each method could serve as an optimal choice for specific use cases. Choose the method that would best enable you to access relevant insights for your project.

Organize Your Data

Once you’ve collected the data resulting from usability testing, organize your data to facilitate the extraction of meaningful insights from it. You might get a great variety of responses from participants when conducting a usability study. Clean the data, then look for responses that can help you achieve the goals you’ve set.

Analyzing all the responses you get from participants could be overwhelming, so focus on the data that would help you deduce relevant findings. Furthermore, the data you’ve collected through a usability study might contain errors and anomalies. Removing such responses is essential because they could significantly influence the results you would get by conducting an analysis.

Make a note of any unexpected actions or odd responses from participants. The data could include errors due to the negligence of participants or notetakers. However, you can’t rule out the possibility that your inability to clearly explain your findings could derive from anomalies in the data. Keeping a record of such instances can help you improve the way in which you conduct usability testing in the future.

Analyze Your Data

Once you’ve organized your data, analyze the data to access meaningful insights to inform decision-making. Depending on the types of responses and data that you’ve gathered, your data might be quantitative or qualitative.

Some quantitative indicators that can help you extract relevant insights from the data include task-completion rate, task-failure rate, error rate, page views, time on task, and participants’ satisfaction level. Figure 2 shows some of these metrics.

Image source: Kinsta

Qualitative indicators represent the types of issues that participants have encountered during their test session, as well as their causes. The goal is to identify the platform’s usability and performance problems before launch. These testing methods can help you identify areas for improvement and come up with viable countermeasures.

Prioritize Solving the Issues That You’ve Identified

Once you’ve identified the key issues, prioritize making the necessary design improvements. When you’re conducting a usability study, participants might encounter a large number of problems, so trying to solve all of them could be overwhelming. Prioritize the issues that require your immediate attention, using the prioritization matrix shown in Figure 3. Then come up with a timeline for remedying all the issues that you need to address.

Image source: Nielsen Norman Group

The best course of action is to rank issues based on their severity and the value that addressing them would generate, along with the complexity of solving particular problems.

Implement Your Findings Through Data-Informed Design Decisions

Once you’ve identified and analyzed the issues, address your findings through a decision-making process that prioritizes the design changes that are necessary to improve the usability of your platform. Compile a detailed report showcasing your findings and discuss them with your key stakeholders. In some cases, your platform might require only minor tweaks, while in other cases, you may need to make major changes to your designs. Brainstorming can help your team devise a viable action plan, discover effective design solutions for the problems you’ve identified, and enable your team to make changes that deliver optimal results.

Final Words

In this article, I’ve detailed how to leverage usability-testing data in making design decisions. I’ve discussed the significance of using usability data in decision-making and provided a series of steps to follow that can ensure you derive maximal benefit from your findings from usability testing. If you’ve been wanting to improve the usability and performance of your platform, this guide can help you through the process.