© Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved. www.hexaware.com

Usability Testing

Presented by

Authors

: Digital Assurance Practice

: Vishvesh Arumugam vishveshA@hexaware.com

: EduKondalu Kalikiri EduKondaluK@Hexaware.com

Whitepaper

Usability Testing

Table of ContentsIntroduction

The Need for Usability Testing

What Hexaware Offers?

Conclusion

About Author

03

03

03

05

06

2© Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved. www.hexaware.com2© Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved. www.hexaware.com

What Hexaware Offers? With decades of rich experience in quality assurance and continuous research and innovation we have come up with a holistic perspective to usability

testing crowned by CrowdSource approach.

3© Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved. www.hexaware.com

Usability Testing

IntroductionUsability testing refers to assessing a product or an application by testing it with the end users. It takes into consideration the level of understanding

and the technical expertise of the end users. It helps determine how fast, accessible and user friendly the product or application is.

The Need for Usability Testing Digital solutions have become important as businesses look for innovative ways to engage and interact with their customers. Today, the digital world

expects seamless service across all the channels to ensure a delightful customer experience. The products are not focusing enough on understanding

the user’s needs, hence failing to meet their expectations. Applications or products are more interested in adding new features, instead of making them

easy-to-use.

In today’s competitive digital world, all products carry almost the same features, but only those make it at the top which are easy to user. Users are

also not willing to spend much time trying to evaluate or understand an application as they have a wide range of options to choose from. A Forrester

research says ‘’77% of the users possibly return if an application is easy to use“, and businesses may fall or lose customer base.

Usability testing is an intricate environment and requires in-depth planning and expertise on the following areas:

• Geographic Diversity : Most applications are designed to be accessed all around the world. Hence, evaluations should also cater users all

across the globe.

• Technological Ecosystem : Some applications make sense only within their intended usage environment and tests should be conducted only

in that context.

• Time and Cost : Usability tests should have a quick turn-around time to report, because the recommended fixes should take place in the same

development cycle.

• Security : Certain prototypes cannot be exposed pre-release and most applications carry confidential information hence usability testing

should pay high attention to information security.

• Performance : The speed of access is critical for sustaining the customer foot print and the speed in which application loads, is key for

user experience.

• Accessibility : Tools help make an application compliant with accessibility guidelines, but to give an equal experience to differently abled

users, the testing should engage them.

Customers are looking for service providers who can offer a diversified user feedback and a measure to determine their applications’ scoring on end

user experience.

Heuristic Evaluation

CrowdSourceApproach

UsabilityMeasurement Index (UMI)

Accessibility Evaluation

Performance Evaluation

4© Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved. www.hexaware.com

Usability Measurement Index - a Quantification ApproachThe Usability Measurement Index (UMI) is an enhanced checklist formulated by our usability experts to assess the interface. Together with the

feedback from the Crowd Source tasks, the experts analyze the entire interface against this index to identify usability issues and generate an overall

usability score based on five key factors.

The five most important factors of usability assessed and evaluated in this approach are:

• Learnability : We evaluate if the capability of a software product can enable the first time user to learn how to use it. Thus, the steps that are

required to perform a task using the product or application can be learned easily, thus making the product or application self explanatory.

• Memorability : After a user learns a product, they may use it again. So even when the user uses the application or product after a long period

of time he or she will be able to use it without any difficulty.

• Efficiency : Evaluate the ability of a user to get information and perform a task within reasonable time Thus the product or application becomes

very much efficient.

• Trust & Credibility : Usability testing should have a quick turn-around time to report as the recommendations or fixes has to be taken place in

the same development cycle to save time and costs.

• Satisfaction : It is very important that the user is satisfied with the overall product. This can only happen if the product or application is

easy to use.

Usability Testing

The CrowdSource Approach Unlike conventional usability tests where users are called to test in a restricted lab, we leverage on the CrowdSource approach which favors the users

and test environment to be relevant to the context. Users sourced from this approach are asked to perform the certain tasks in the Think Aloud method

which encourages users to speak out their thoughts and actions and provide feedback on the overall experience.

Usability experts are helped by the Crowdsource team in picking the right set of user groups for testing based on the domain and demographic

requirements of the application.

We leverage Remote Testing to cover variety of users with geographic diversity and technological ecosystem. Our team of usability experts closely

observes and records each user’s behavior, performance and experience, which helps in discovering critical usability parameters such as:

• Time on a task

• Issues per task

• Navigation patterns

• Eye focus tracking

• Mouse paths and clicks

However, often what users do is different from what they say. We carefully evaluate user feedback and their interaction behaviors to bridge the gap

between intention and perception.

The Hexaware AdvantageHexaware has a very unique approach called as Usability Management Index (UMI).

The framework to quantify any application usability using theUMI is what sets Hexaware apart from its competitors.

5© Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved. www.hexaware.com

Performance EvaluationThe performance of the system is rigorously evaluated under realistic conditions to identify usability issues and to compare measures such as success rate, task time and user satisfaction with requirements. The realistic conditions include the speed of the CPU, the data connectivity, etc. But Hexaware considers all these factors which may affect the performance of the application or product. Thus Hexaware has an advantage over its competitors, since it considers all these condition while making the product or application itself.After all evaluations are complete, our usability team brainstorms their findings and solutions, and aggregates them to create a customized usability report.

Usability Testing

Heuristic EvaluationBased on Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability principles known as Heuristics, evaluators examine the interface and judge its compliance with these principles.

Heuristic evaluations assure an application for basic usability.

Heuristic evaluation is extensive, and if performed early can reduce time and cost on development.

Accessibility EvaluationHexaware has the potential to make interfaces as per usability standards, thus making the websites or applications fast and user friendly. According to the

law, differently abled people have equal rights to access and use any website or application. Hence, it is important that the interface complies with

accessibility standards. Very often interfaces are designed without considering accessibility, which leads to customer dissatisfaction. But Hexaware always

considers its users feedbacks and works on them, thus making all products that are designed by Hexaware easily accessible and user friendly.

We employ assistive technologies and special users to verify the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) defined by the World Wide Web

Consortium. The following accessibility principles are evaluated under WCAG 2.0:

Conclusion: Usability testing is critical for the success of any application or product. Hexaware has had many success stories to its credit and its usability recommendations

improved the client’s product efficiency by almost 10%. The comprehensive report with qualitative and quantitative feedback that Hexaware provides, gives

the client a decisive edge in developing a superior user-friendly application.

RobustUnderstandableOperablePerceivable

6© Hexaware Technologies. All rights reserved. www.hexaware.com

Usability Testing

DisclaimerContents of this whitepaper are the exclusive property of Hexaware Technologies and may not be reproduced in any form without the prior written consent of Hexaware Technologies.

To learn more, visit http://www.hexaware.com

1095 Cranbury South River Road, Suite 10, Jamesburg, NJ 08831. Main: 609-409-6950 | Fax: 609-409-6910

About Author:Vishvesh Arumugam Vish is an experienced strategic consultant involved in defining testing strategies and testing solutions for large transformational programs. His strengths are

process optimization, engagement planning and estimation strategies for projects in ERP, PLM and banking applications. He has rich experience in

understanding client’s “As - Is” process maturity and provides tailor made processes to align with client’s testing team for maturity goals. He brings in strong

testing project life cycle experience with hands on experience in end-to-end operations.

EduKondalu KalikiriKondal is passionate about designing the things that are of the users, by the users and for the users. He has been pursuing this passion for more than a

decade and has a sound experience in each and every layer of UCD/UXD process. His core academics are into Visual design and trained in HCI- Human

Computer Interaction. He loves understanding the user needs and finding a meaningful solutions to them. He has rich experience in leading the design

solutions for numerous products in Healthcare, Travel, E-Commerce, Gaming domains. He is vocal in emphasizing the need and importance of usability

testing in software development cycle and is been instrumental in building and leading the practice as one of the core offerings of Quality Assurance and

Testing services at Hexaware Technologies.