Heuristics - User Experience Testing

Hi People,

Its been many days I have been thinking to write something. I have made enough drafts and failed to post them. I don't know if it is this difficult to post the drafted thoughts. Finally this is the one that I am bringing to your eyes.

Through this post I am making an attempt to throw some light on one of the essential 'Quality criteria' to be considered while testing any application - 'User Experience'. 

I have tried my best to narrate what is User Experience and came up with a list of  few heuristics that you can use while testing for User Experience.

Why is User Experience Testing important?

Scene 1: You are hungry. You go to a restaurant, order your favorite food. What if it is served in an untidy plate?

Scene 2: You need to travel and reach the office in time. You caught the bus at right time and it is going at a right speed. What if the bus is crowded?

Ohhhhh crap!  

This is what we say when we have a bad experience. The question here is, why is that you are not satisfied even though your purpose is met. So, there is something else that bothers you and keeps you unsatisfied, though the requirement is fulfilled.

So similarly, we should notice that, any application, be its requirements are met, it is not accepted by users, unless it provides good User Experience. So, here arises the need to not to restrict the testing to requirements alone!

Heuristics:

Before I list down some heuristics, let me define 'Heuristic' for you ~ 'Heuristic is an approach to find a bug which may or may not be fruitful'

In fact, as the only fundamental aspect of any product being 'Satisfy the user', every heuristic we use while testing adds up to User Experience testing.

So, Here is the list of few heuristics, one could use while testing for UX (I say them as heuristics because I am not sure would they end up fruitful wrt to UX testing, as the context differs every time)

Emotion

Human emotions are what that play an important role to decide the UX of the product. Its all about how does the emotions of an user change while using the application. The app needs to be tested considering various aspects of the application that may turn off/on mood of a user. Example: Feel and Flow of the app, UI aspects, etc

Expectation

User expectations are the deciding factors. Keeping in mind the brand of the app, kind of app, success of previous releases of the app, users might be having some expectations. If the app doesn't meet the user expectations it may turn out to be a failure.

Relevancy

User shouldn't experience any irrelevant or undesirable experience. To explain this better let me take an example of error messages. The error messages shown should be relevant with the error occurred. The User should be able to understand the error on reading the message displayed.

Audience

While testing we need to test the app keeping in mind the type of audience who are going to use it. Different audience look for different things in the app. For example what a kid expects is not the same as an old man needs. So testing with the mindset of right audience will help a lot.

Content

The content of the application should be relevant and appropriate to the customer's needs. It also should be according to the business goals. The content should be structured in such a way that the user has a good experience while reading it.

Competitor Analysis:

In this competitive world, you can stay ahead of your competitor by providing better User Experience. Considering the User Experience with other competitive applications, we can end up with bunch of ideas to test upon.

 Reviews

Considering the various reviews given by the users for the same / similar products, we can come up with a bunch of test ideas that could help the application to overcome the failures if any. Reviews act as a good mode to scale the User Experience of the application.

Branding

Though the branding is always essential in any application, it shouldn't dominate the content and annoy the user. Also, in contrast, we need to make sure enough branding is done. So, tester can keep this in mind to generate more test ideas.


Remember, while implementing all these heuristics, we assume the behavior of an user. So, we end up coming up with the behavior what we (Tester) expect than what others expect. We need to make an attempt to discuss the behavior of an user at every step with fellow testers and take in the inputs.


Thanks for reading, guess this was helpful. Do drop in some comments that would help me to learn better so that I could help you more, again and again!

Happy Testing!