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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 services - ScienceSoft
Usability testing services - ScienceSoft

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.

See the aspects we test

The aspects we test:

Navigation and structure: we assess how easy it is to navigate your application and help to identify complex, unclear, and inconvenient navigation components.

Workflows and scenarios: we test how a solution’s usability influences performing basic and advanced tasks, ensure that a user can complete the scenarios doing operations in your application.

Content accessibility: we assess how convenient the arrangement of GUI elements is, whether text and background colors are suitable, check the compliance with such standards as WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and Section 508, if applicable.

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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.

Explore the stages of our UX audit

The stages of our UX audit

  1. Investigation of the solution based on app or web analytics to discover the main scenarios of user behavior.
  2. Checking a solution’s structure and navigation: identifying if an application structure and navigation are logical and clear for end users. Potential problems may be indicated, for example, with web statistics. It helps identify a very high rate of search functionality usage, a high rate of users browsing through a long list of categories before reaching the endpoint and more.
  3. Detecting the problems with web usability and design based on the following guidelines and principles:
  • Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design
  • WCAG 2.0
  • Web Usability Guidelines
  • Feature inspection

As a result, we prepare a detailed audit report with detected usability issues and barriers categorizing them depending on the level of severity and giving recommendations to mitigate and overcome them.

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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.

Check what our UX research includes

Our UX research includes

  • User research: we gather problems and needs of your potential target audience through expert review, interviews, surveys, eye movement tracking and other methods and build the models of how users will interact with your product.
  • Persona creation: we build the prototypes of potential users with such info as name, bio, background, habits, goals and motivations, and more.
  • Scenario creation: we investigate how a persona can solve their problems with your solution basing our ideas on our experience in UX research and testing.
  • User journey mapping: we illustrate all possible touchpoints a user comes across while using your application.
  • UI prototyping: we create a prototype of your product to illustrate its functionality and logic.

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Selected Projects

Mental Health Software Revamp to Improve Security and Performance for NGO Serving 15,000+ Patients
Case Study

Mental Health Software Revamp to Improve Security and Performance for NGO Serving 15,000+ Patients

ScienceSoft modernized a suite of mental health software for a US NGO serving over 15,000 patients. We conducted UX and code audits, refactored and redeveloped software components, migrated valuable research data, implemented UX/UI updates, and delivered new features.

In-Depth UX Audit Reveals the Reasons Behind Low Mobile Conversions
Case Study

In-Depth UX Audit Reveals the Reasons Behind Low Mobile Conversions

ScienceSoft performed a UX audit of a luxury real estate agency’s mobile website. The audit focused on the issues that could prevent the Client from getting higher mobile conversions and provided hands-on recommendations on how to fix uncovered errors.

Fitness Product Redesign and Marketing Strategy Ready in 2 Months
Fitness Product Redesign and Marketing Strategy Ready in 2 Months Case Study

Fitness Product Redesign and Marketing Strategy Ready in 2 Months

ScienceSoft helped Triad Fitness Group redesign its TriadXP workout app and develop a new marketing strategy. Thanks to our product consulting, UX research, and UI design services, the client got a sleek, user-friendly fitness app able to reach a broader audience.

Managed Testing of HIE Software Integrated with Multiple EHRs
Case Study

Managed Testing of HIE Software Integrated with Multiple EHRs

ScienceSoft rendered managed testing services to a US company providing software solutions for hospitals, pharmacies, and assisted living organizations.

Quality Assessment and Redesign of a Custom EHR for Improved Functionality and PHI Security
Case Study

Quality Assessment and Redesign of a Custom EHR for Improved Functionality and PHI Security

As a result of the code review for a US local chiropractic care provider, ScienceSoft detected serious vulnerabilities in the client's EHR application. Our team provided business consulting and full software redesign to enhance security and user experience.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

Remove Barriers to Successful User Adoption of Your App

ScienceSoft is ready to assist in testing usability of your application and adding to user satisfaction. Don’t hesitate to set up a free consultation with our experts.