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Usability testing is a popular technique of user acceptance testing. Users are made to use a webpage, or application, a system, or any consumer product for that matter. Based on the experiment, a list of user inputs are determined. How users use the system is determined.
Usability testing is different from usability inspection. The latter does not involve users. Usability inspection is done by specialized people who do most of the testing on the user interface.
Usability testing checks if a product matches to the expectations of users. Usability testing is not just the domain of software and hardware. It is popular in the food industry as well.
Usability testing is also applied on written literature. Empirical methods are derived to understand if users’ goals have been met. Usability testing is indeed a formidable quality assurance technique.
Usability testing follows the black-box testing principle. The principle is based on not having any prior knowledge of using the product. When users use the product, observations are made. Products are tested for various parameters. Some of them are accuracy, efficiency, speed, access time, access effort, and the general user friendly design of the product.
For example, while testing a web portal, usability testers base the usability testing on various things. Some of them are:
Performance – How long the web page took to openAccess – How long and in how many clicks the user got to the required information
Recall – How the user can recall access steps. The better the design of the webpage, the better is the recall of the users.
Personal taste – Did the person like the website and stay on longer?
