Have you ever thought about how will you deal with any post-launch issues with your mobile app? What if a user cannot use your mobile app for its intended purpose? What if he finds it difficult to navigate seamlessly through your app? These questions and many others like these are undoubtedly a nightmare for mobile app developers. Nevertheless, there is a very effective way to tackle all such possible issues beforehand rather than regretting them later.
That magical solution is known as user testing. You can do it at the end of your app development before launching it. Alternatively, you can even do it periodically at the end of every iteration. This process allows you to get feedback from a small set of users on the overall usage of your app. This feedback includes its functionality as well as its user interface. User testing provides clarity on the usage convenience of your mobile app.
This feedback also lets you assess the performance of your development team. For example, you will be able to know how well your backend developer has catered to the storage requirements. Or how appealing your UI frontend developer has developed the interface of your mobile app. Therefore, today, we will quickly share with you the 6 crucial steps involved in mobile app user testing.
Defining your Objectives
Whatever tasks you are going to accomplish, you must list them beforehand. Similarly, you need to clearly define the goals that you want to achieve with your app user testing. For that, you can ask yourself the following sample questions:
- How easy it is for a new user to navigate through your app?
- What challenges could a new user face in accomplishing any specific task while using your mobile app?
- To what extent your user finds the interface of your mobile app friendly and user-centered designed by your UI frontend developer?
The list of such questions goes on and on. You can pen down as many of them as you wish. This will make your user testing process all the more thorough.
Selecting a Suitable Testing Methodology
Depending on the feedback you are trying to collect from your test participants, you can select a testing methodology. There is a large number of different testing methodologies available out there. However, they classify into two main categories i.e. moderated testing and unmoderated testing. The former ones allow you to monitor your test participants either remotely or in person while they are testing your app. During this process, you can communicate with them regarding their ambiguities. However, this methodology can introduce certain biases in the participants’ feedback.
On the other hand, the latter approach lets the participants do everything on their own without the hesitation of anyone monitoring their activities hence allowing them to come up with unbiased feedback. Nevertheless, this methodology has its own limitations. You cannot communicate with your participants in real time if you tend to adopt this one. Now, it is entirely up to you whether you are willing to compromise on unbiased feedback or on real-time communication with the test participants. This will let you decide on a suitable testing methodology.
Recruiting your Test Participants
After defining your goals and selecting a relevant user testing methodology, the next thing to do is to recruit a sample of participants who are going to test your mobile app. Now, the first question that might hit your mind is how should you recruit your participants and how many of them will be enough for user testing. Well, it is neither recommended to choose random people for this task or people from your own development team. The former set of participants might have no clue about the working of your app whereas the latter ones will already know too much about your app that will consequently impact their feedback.
Therefore, you should always try to look for people from your pre-decided target audience for whom you are building this mobile app who are either already using a similar app or are in dire need of one. Secondly, the number of test participants should range between 5 to 10. There is no practical need for recruiting more than 10 participants for user testing since their feedback will become repetitive.
Setting up your Testing Environment and Making Test Cases
Now, you need to reconsider the objectives that you laid down in the first step of the user testing process. These objectives will help you out in creating distinct tasks that you wish your users to accomplish as a part of the user testing process. For example, you have developed an online shopping app. Then you might want your user to select a specific dress from your online store. After that, put that dress in his/ her shopping cart, etc. In this way, you can create all the test cases that you want your users to validate. Moreover, you also need to provide all the essentials that are required for testing your mobile app while setting up your testing environment. By the end of this step, you will be all set to carry out the user testing of your mobile app.
Carrying out the User Testing
Now that you have carefully and correctly performed all the above-mentioned steps, it is time to move ahead with the user testing of your app. In this step, you will actually be carrying out user testing. If you have provided all the necessary tools to carry out this procedure, your participants will simply start testing your app. You can keep collecting their feedback meanwhile. There is nothing more technical involved in this step as such provided that the previous steps have already been carried out successfully.
Inspecting the Results and Making Improvements
Finally, comes the most important step of the user testing process. Now when you have the users’ feedback at hand, you need to analyze it very carefully. In this way, you can figure out what needs to be fixed in your mobile app. You might have to ask your UI frontend developer to make your app design more intuitive or you might have to ask your mobile app developer to make a certain functionality simpler, etc. Thus, you can make modifications to your mobile app in light of the feedback that you have collected through user testing. This will improve the overall outlook of your app before it is actually launched in the market.
Concluding Remarks
With a proper user testing plan in place, your mobile app can actually work wonders after you have deployed it successfully. For the user testing of your mobile app, you can keep in mind the 6-step procedure that we have shared with you in this guide or you can take the services of an organization in this regard that already excels in this domain such as Folium AI. In this way, you will be able to figure out all the potential issues in your mobile app. Also, you will be able to fix them before your intended users get their hands on your mobile app. This will definitely ensure the ultimate success of your mobile app.
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