Usability Testing and UX Audit Services
ScienceSoft’s UX services include usability testing, UX audit, and UX research. Our usability testing experts can facilitate the solution’s user adoption by ensuring the smoothness of its user journeys.
Usability testing is aimed to ensure the logical arrangement of a solution’s UI elements, convenient content layout and the number of usage steps.
Services We Provide
Usability testing
With profound knowledge of business, technology and UX trends, and experience in multiple industries, we assess how easy and clear your solution is for end users.
UX audit
The scope of our usability audit includes reviewing an information architecture; detecting interactive pain points, UI defects and performance issues; and preparing recommendations to improve your application.
UX research
With the team of experienced UX specialists, business analysts and web designers, we go beyond pure usability testing and audit and offer UX services to get important information, which may be unavailable from prior UX design.
Selected Projects
Cooperation Models
Usability testing as a separate service
We test your software product or just a part of it from the user perspective to detect usability problems and potential adoption barriers.
Usability testing as a part of QA
We test your application from various sides: functionality, performance, compatibility, security – and include usability into this list.
Usability testing as a part of UX research
We are ready to go beyond pure usability testing and offer complete application UX research: from user research and persona creation to usability testing and UI audit with further solution redesign if needed.
Challenges We Solve
No usability design
Successful usability testing services are hardly possible without such context info as a persona and a user journey. We involve our competences in UX research to perform persona creation to model real users with real needs, problems and expectations from software and do customer journey mapping to create the visual representation of the product usage.
Usability requirements vary for different domains
Wide experience in multiple domains (including healthcare, retail, banking, manufacturing, and more) helps us to walk in a customer’s shoes and understand real needs of your target audience and their usage patterns. Additionally, being ISO 27001-certified, we guarantee that cooperation with us don't pose any security threats.
Usability requirements vary for different users
Even within one application, the approaches to usability requirements and testing may differ if the application will be used by different groups of users. For example, if it’s a corporate app for employees, we test its convenience for various roles across a company reproducing real-life scenarios of solving business problems with the application. Also, we check if UI has the elements that help new users and do not irritate the experienced ones.
Usability testing can be ineffective without reproducing real-life context
We reproduce real-life situations to ensure objective usability testing on a variety of devices in the variety of settings your target audience is likely to use the application. For example, mobile usability testing should consider such specifics as doing tasks on the move with many distractions, lack of access to stable connectivity, various types of data input (touchscreens, voice inputs, and more). As for desktop applications, their usability may be influenced by e.g., illumination in the office or at home, the ability to use a mouse and so on.
With many identified issues, it’s difficult to establish the best order of fixing
Relying on a mature ISO 9001-certified quality management system, we not solely point at usability problems. We prioritize identified issues defining the degree of their severity to focus on impactful aspects. Also, we establish the most convenient order to fix issues and ensure that the updates to an application’s usability components won’t cause new ones.
Techniques and Methodologies We Use
Expert-based usability testing
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Heuristic evaluation
A UX researcher has no information about the operations a real user is likely to perform with a tested application and potential sequence of a user’s actions. The researcher assesses usability aspects of your application by comparing them against a set of usability heuristics.
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Cognitive walkthrough
The method is similar to heuristic evaluation, but a UX researcher is given the tasks and scenarios that a user is likely to perform using a tested application.
User-based usability testing
Members of the target audience use a prototype or a ready application to complete scenarios developed by a UX researcher. While performing the scenarios, users are asked to verbalize their thoughts and guesses and explain why they do certain actions in the tested app. A UX researcher processes the testing results and prepares a report.
To get additional user perspective and increase the sample, we also add app usage, web statistics, interviews and surveys to our usability testing and UX research.