If you are part of a saas team or product development team, user testing is one of your product’s key success factors.
This means there is no way you can skip user testing. With the global pandemic on the rise and new restrictions arriving each day, performing this traditionally can become a challenge.
Solution? It’s time to go remote.
You may have anxieties about how well remote user testing works with quantitative testing, but the answer lies in your mindset.
While the global workforce is adapting to the new way of work, so does your testing approach. You need to get creative here and adapt to your landscape.
In fact, going remote with user testing has its benefits.
How Does Remote User Testing Work?
Before getting into how remote user testing works, let’s consider the benefits that come with remote usability testing.
- Fast: If your product has to maintain its fanbase, it needs to evolve with your users’ changing requirements. This means keeping your product development process agile is essential. Remote usability testing makes sure you are on top of your game. What’s more, this is the best method to test your solution when your test-takers can’t reach you.
- Cheap: It comes as a boon when your business is low on monetary resources. It’s much cheaper in on-site usability testing.
- Efficient: When it comes to convenience, remote testing surpasses all expectations. It is specifically helpful when test takers and reviewers are divided by countries and time zones. It’s a boon for product developers during the time of Covid-19. You can still perform effective testing while maintaining social distancing regulations.
Now the big question here is how to make the most of it?
Here’s how?
Tips to optimize the power of your next usability testing
No matter which quantitative test you opt for, there is a framework that can ensure you can make most of your test. Moderated or unmoderated, the following are the key steps that you should never miss.
- Define your test goals and focus group: Having a clear understanding of your user test goals and focus group ensures that you are on track from the beginning. Now you can start planning the specific areas of your product you want to test with your test-takers. In such a scenario, defining a user goal is essential. Then you can create a task-based activity that can validate the areas seamlessly. Once you have decided on this step, you can move on to recruiting your ideal participants.
- Recruit test taker carefully: Choosing your ideal test taker is crucial to the overall success of the test. You can always validate this by mapping your test taker details with the ideal persona. But recruiting is by far the easiest stage in remote user testing. You can not only choose from a handful of test-takers but have access to global people from anywhere you require to test. This helps gain more precision and accuracy in your tests, hitting the right demographics and audience of target geography.
Pro tip: Social media does a splendid job in connecting you to your target market who may be interested in what you have to offer.
- Execute pilot tests: No matter how deep you conducted your research, there is always room for failure for your assumptions. To validate your hypothesis, running pilot tests is crucial. It can not only clear your understanding of your users’ key pain points but allow you an opportunity to discard problems that they do not care about. This is your one-stop solution to fail fast in product development, increasing chances of long-term success.
- Provide overview: Creating a clear understanding of what your test is about and what you are trying to achieve with it needs to be communicated to your test-takers. Also, it is a good practice to set expectations of your test taker about the kind of experience they can have with the product in real-time.
- Summarize the results: Your user testing session is never complete without thorough analytics of the results. In this stage, you accumulate the numerous data points collected from your users to find and trace out patterns and critical areas of friction that guide your future iteration process.
Pro tip: Investing in a user testing platform can always come in handy in such cases. But, how do you know which platform suits your needs the best?
What do you see in your ideal user testing partner? Find out.
Who is your ideal partner for user testing
Collaboration and partnerships are some of the best ways to streamline your business operations. User testing is no different. Following are the key features that you should look at while finalizing your ideal user testing platform.
Omnidevice capabilities: The best platform for user testing always focuses on the accessibility of creating the tests. If your user testing platform doesn’t support you with creating tests from all devices, be it mobile, desktop, or laptop, it is not doing its best job.
Participate in remote users tests from any device: Your best user testing platform must empower your test takers and test builders alike. This means, harnessing the power of the cloud interface, your test takers should be able to take the tests wherever and whenever they like.
Improved data comprehension: The goal of any user testing is to ensure you have high-quality user behavior data related to your product. But, if you cannot comprehend the collected data fast and easily, your tests are not fully optimized. The best-performing user testing platform would solve this inherent problem with a one-stop dashboard where you can keep track of the changing behavior in real-time. The best one will have graphical illustrations of data points.
- Secured environment: Data is the lifeblood of your business. This means you cannot take virtual security for granted. Also, to get optimum results, your test-takers need to feel confident in the platform. There would be numerous times when you would need to take care to keep your test-takers private information safe and secured.
Parting advice
Testing your product with your end-users will always remain crucial for developing the best solution to a problem. While you stay steadfast on testing, it is essential to be flexible about your user testing approach.
Remember, the key here is to get the performance analytics of your solution as fast as you can. This will supercharge your goal of achieving product-market fit.
The above tips and tricks will surely help you leverage on this. But to truly ace the test, you have to focus on the quality of questions you ask.