What is Usability Testing?
Usability testing is a type of product research that helps companies establish a better understanding of the mindset and experiences of people interacting with their product. One type of user research—a broad term for studying the views and behaviors of users—usability testing or user testing specifically examines the features and functionality of a product or service. While conducted across industries, this article explores usability testing specifically in the edtech industry. For edtech companies seeking feedback on new learning solutions, usability research gathers insights directly from teachers and students in classroom settings.
Based on the features and purpose of the edtech tool being studied, a usability study is codesigned to encompass basic but critical aspects of user interaction. For edtech companies, this may include interactions like: logging into a platform; generating a progress report for a student; creating a lesson plan; setting up a class; or integrating with an existing learning management system.
Students, teachers, administrators, or parents that reflect the tool’s target user test the product to identify positive, unintuitive, and/or frustrating aspects of the user experience. This collective data can be leveraged to ensure that your product and its features are easy to use and meet the wants and needs of educators, students, parents, and administrators.
Who Are Usability Studies For?
There is no hard and fast rule to determine when a company is ready for usability testing, though optimal candidates tend to be mid- or later-stage companies with an established user base that are looking to refine their user experience, improve retention, and address user frustrations. For successful usability testing, companies also need a minimum viable product.
One common way of determining if a user base is “strong” is understanding how your Daily Active Users (DUA) compares to your Monthly Active Users (MUA) ratio—the average for edtech companies is 13 percent.
If an edtech company doesn’t yet have an established user-base it may be worthwhile to use research to interrogate the value proposition and basic premise of the product through focus groups and interviews with new or potential customers.
Why Conduct Usability Testing?
Create an optimal user experience
Every edtech company wants to produce a product that is valuable to students and teachers, and in order for that value to be realized, the product must be easy to use. Usability testing helps identify what the optimal user experience actually looks like for each unique product. Through both task analyses and user interviews, the strengths and challenges of the current user experience come to light. The data can be used to enhance the user experience, ensure features are being used to their fullest potential, and reconcile product development decisions with user realities.
A highly-optimized user experience is in turn beneficial for product-led growth, which allows companies to rely less on sales and marketing for growth—an important consideration in the current consumer marketplace.
Understand common user frustrations
An unintuitive or overly complex experience when using a new tool can be infuriating as a user. Frustration is only amplified for a teacher helping multiple classrooms use the tool, or a technology team onboarding an entire staff—a reality made clear in low retention rates across edtech. In the best case, users power through and perhaps use the tool infrequently or not to its full potential. In the worst case, users give up and abandon the tool, or seek a more intuitive option. More often than not, it’s the worst case scenario: Education apps have only a 2.1% retention rate at 30 days. As educators and schools face resource and capacity constraints, unaddressed user frustrations can hinder adoption and implementation of an otherwise great edtech product.
Understanding the aspects of your product’s user experience causing frustration is a key goal of usability research. Using a third party research entity helps ensure testers are comfortable giving honest feedback about their frustrations during the study. With the insights shared, you are empowered to make data-driven changes to features and processes.
Identify missing product features
Educators and students hold a wealth of knowledge as regular users of myriad edtech tools. Their experience using edtech across classes, curricula, and environments means they are ideal UX research partners. They often have keen and creative ideas for new or missing product features that can broaden the appeal or application of a tool.
Other types of user research, like in-app feedback, can help companies understand what’s needed from people already using the product. Usability testing provides this same type of feedback more objectively, while also identifying features (or lack thereof) that keep people from using the product. Insights from testers who wouldn’t get far enough into an app to submit feedback are captured.
In addition to improving the overall product, identifying and incorporating these features relatively early in the research journey improves the quality of feasibility and implementation research down the line.
Guiding Questions for a Usability Study
Research questions used are developed with the product and goals of the study in mind and thus vary with each study, however, key guiding questions are at the core of all usability studies.
How well can end users independently navigate and use the product?
Centered on the true usability of the product, this guiding question examines how successfully end users can navigate the product on their own. Are they able to find all of the features and use them? Which aspects of the product or process are contributing to ideal experiences? What barriers are users encountering that hinder their interaction with the product or specific features? These types of questions are explored through task analyses.
What value does the tool bring to teachers and students in the classroom?
In a competitive market where schools are using large edtech stacks, it’s important to understand the value your product brings to teachers and students in real learning environments. Questions spun from this guiding question uncover key wants and needs from users, features that set your product apart in their eyes, and features that may not be as valuable as initially thought. These types of questions are explored through user interviews.
How to Prepare for a Usability Study
Build an evidence base
Before embarking on a usability study, ensure you are research ready. Having a sound logic model and assessing your product’s functionality, standards alignment, and data-security policies establishes an essential foundation for usability testing.
A logic model lays out how people should interact with a product in order to achieve the product’s intended outcomes. Subsequent usability testing makes sure there are no barriers to this interaction and refines the process. Depending on the stage of your product’s development, preliminary user research that collects qualitative data on an early concept or prototype can offer critical insights before launching a larger school-based usability study.
Ensures Basic functionality and accessibility standards
Usability research puts your product directly in a learning environment, so it needs to be fully operational and aligned to basic accessibility standards before beginning testing. It would be inefficient to use usability research to find out that an app completely breaks when used on Chromebooks or the screen goes black after a student finishes a lesson. Usability testing should be less about fixing bugs and more about creating a frictionless user experience.
Additionally, there are other aspects of user interaction that can be refined before usability testing. Edtech products should be designed from the earliest stages with accessibility in mind. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a great reference tool for how to display and organize information.
As a structured way to collect feedback, ongoing usability testing is an essential part of every company’s research process. It informs your product’s roadmap, lays the groundwork for larger feasibility or implementation studies, and refines the user experience—making sure the product is used as intended and features desired by users are incorporated.
To determine if usability testing is right for your company, visit our Codesign Product Research webpage and get in touch with our team.
