Product Design

Usability Testing

In the realm of digital product development, understanding how users interact with your product is not just beneficial—it's essential. We offer usability testing to assess and pinpoint how real users navigate and experience your app or website. This process not only identifies usability issues but also provides valuable insights into user behavior, preferences, and satisfaction levels. At Echobind, we take a systematic approach aimed at validating (or invalidating) design assumptions, identifying potential improvements, and ensuring that your product aligns with user expectations before you invest in engineering. By involving users directly in the testing process, we can uncover usability problems and make adjustments to our designs, saving you the money and time it might cost to correct issues once the product has been developed.

What to Expect

At Echobind, we offer usability testing as a stand alone service for existing products, as part of team augmentation, and as a part of any new app design. We use two different types of usability testing, moderated and unmoderated, depending on the needs of the project.

Moderated Testing

One of our design researchers handles every part of the process manually, from creating the testing script, sourcing and scheduling participants, to running the sessions. While moderated tests can be time-intensive, they offer the benefit of allowing the researcher to ask follow-up questions in real time resulting in richer qualitative insights.

Unmoderated Testing

Participants are recruited using a third party tool, UserBrain, and the sessions are unmonitored. Our researchers write a series of task scenarios and prepare a prototype. UserBrain then recruits participants from their pool of testers and we receive recordings of the sessions once they are complete. We use unmoderated testing the most as it’s the fastest and easiest way to recruit a larger number of testers and get quantitative insights about your product.

Once we’ve completed the test sessions, our team will spend time reviewing and analyzing the recordings and notes from each one. We’ll categorize insights into themes, capture quotes, and sometimes pull out short clips from the tests for particular trouble spots so you can watch how participants respond to various interactions and features.

Once we’ve completed our analysis, we’ll use the insights to make recommendations about the next steps. If we are testing a prototype we’ve created, we’ll use those insights to make design changes before finalizing things.

How It Works

Milestones

• Outline Usability Test Objectives
• Prepare Task Scenarios & Script
• Recruit Participants
• Conduct Test Sessions
• Analyze Recordings & Create Final Report

Deliverables

• Usability test plan
• Script and task scenarios
• Final report outlining insights, quantitative data, and our recommendations for next steps
• Recordings and notes from any test sessions