task analysis vs usability testing

Usability Testing: Everything You Need to Know (Methods, Tools, and Examples)

As you crack into the world of UX design, there’s one thing you absolutely must understand and learn to practice like a pro: usability testing.

Precisely because it’s such a critical skill to master, it can be a lot to wrap your head around. What is it exactly, and how do you do it? How is it different from user testing? What are some actual methods that you can employ?

In this guide, we’ll give you everything you need to know about usability testing—the what, the why, and the how.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What is usability testing and why does it matter?
• Usability testing vs. user testing
• Formative vs. summative usability testing
• Attitudinal vs. behavioral research

Performance testing

Card sorting, tree testing, 5-second test, eye tracking.

• How to learn more about usability testing

Ready? Let’s dive in.

1. What is usability testing and why does it matter?

Simply put, usability testing is the process of discovering ways to improve your product by observing users as they engage with the product itself (or a prototype of the product). It’s a UX research method specifically trained on—you guessed it—the usability of your products. And what is usability ? Usability is a measure of how easily users can accomplish a given task with your product.

Usability testing, when executed well, uncovers pain points in the user journey and highlights barriers to good usability. It will also help you learn about your users’ behaviors and preferences as these relate to your product, and to discover opportunities to design for needs that you may have overlooked.

You can conduct usability testing at any point in the design process when you’ve turned initial ideas into design solutions, but the earlier the better. Test early and test often! You can conduct some kind of usability testing with low- and high- fidelity prototypes alike—and testing should continue after you’ve got a live, out-in-the-world product.

2. Usability testing vs. user testing

Though they sound similar and share a somewhat similar end goal, usability testing and user testing are two different things. We’ll look at the differences in a moment, but first, here’s what they have in common:

• Both share the end goal of creating a design solution to meet real user needs
• Both take the time to observe and listen to the user to hear from them what needs/pain points they experience
• Both look for feasible ways of meeting those needs or addressing those pain points

User testing essentially asks if this particular kind of user would want this particular kind of product—or what kind of product would benefit them in the first place. It is entirely user-focused.

Usability testing, on the other hand, is more product-focused and looks at users’ needs in the context of an existing product (even if that product is still in prototype stages of development). Usability testing takes your existing product and places it in the hands of your users (or potential users) to see how the product actually works for them—how they’re able to accomplish what they need to do with the product.

3. Formative vs. summative usability testing

Alright! Now that you understand what usability testing is, and what it isn’t, let’s get into the various types of usability testing out there.

There are two broad categories of usability testing that are important to understand— formative and summative . These have to do with when you conduct the testing and what your broad objectives are—what the overarching impact the testing should have on your product.

Formative usability testing: 

• Is a qualitative research process 
• Happens earlier in the design, development, or iteration process
• Seeks to understand what about the product needs to be improved
• Results in qualitative findings and ideation that you can incorporate into prototypes and wireframes

Summative usability testing:

• Is a research process that’s more quantitative in nature
• Happens later in the design, development, or iteration process
• Seeks to understand whether the solutions you are implementing (or have implemented) are effective
• Results in quantitative findings that can help determine broad areas for improvement or specific areas to fine-tune (this can go hand in hand with competitive analysis )

4. Attitudinal vs. behavioral research

Alongside the timing and purpose of the testing (formative vs. summative), it’s important to understand two broad categories that your research (both your objectives and your findings) will fall into: behavioral and attitudinal.

Attitudinal research is all about what people say—what they think  and communicate about your product and how it works. Behavioral research focuses on what people do—how they actually do interact with your product and the feelings that surface as a result.

What people say and what people do are often two very different things. These two categories help define those differences, choose our testing methods more intentionally, and categorize our findings more effectively.

5. Five essential usability testing methods

Some usability testing methods are geared more towards uncovering either behavioral or attitudinal findings; but many have the potential to result in both.

Of the methods you’ll learn about in this section, performance testing has the greatest potential for targeting both—and will perhaps require the greatest amount of thoughtfulness regarding how you approach it.

Naturally, then, we’ll spend a little more time on that method than the other four, though that in no way diminishes their usefulness! Here are the methods we’ll cover:

These are merely five common and/or interesting methods—it is not a comprehensive list of every method you can use to get inside the hearts and minds of your users. But it’s a place to start. So here we go!

In performance testing, you sit down with a user and give them a task (or set of tasks) to complete with the product.

This is often a combination of methods and approaches that will allow you to interview users, see how they use your product, and find out how they feel about the experience afterward. Depending on your approach, you’ll observe them, take notes, and/or ask usability testing questions before, after, or along the way.

Performance testing is by far the most talked-about form of usability testing—especially as it’s often combined with other methods. Performance testing is what most commonly comes to mind in discussions of usability testing as a whole, and it’s what many UX design certification programs focus on—because it’s so broadly useful and adaptive.

While there’s no one right way to conduct performance testing, there are a number of approaches and combinations of methods you can use, and you’ll want to be intentional about it.

It’s a method that you can adapt to your objectives—so make sure you do! Ask yourself what kind of attitudinal or behavioral findings you’re really looking for, how much time you’ll have for each testing session, and what methods or approaches will help you reach your objectives most efficiently.

Performance testing is often combined with user interviews . For a quick guide on how to ask great questions during this part of a testing session, watch this video:

Even if you choose not to combine performance testing with user interviews, good performance testing will still involve some degree of questioning and moderating.

Performance testing typically results in a pretty massive chunk of qualitative insights, so you’ll need to devote a fair amount of intention and planning before you jump in.

Maximize the usefulness of your research by being thoughtful about the task(s) you assign and what approach you take to moderating the sessions. As your test participants go about the task(s) you assign, you’ll watch, take notes, and ask questions either during or after the test—depending on your approach.

Four approaches to performance testing

There are four ways you can go about moderating a performance test , and it’s worth understanding and choosing your approach (or combination of approaches) carefully and intentionally. As you choose, take time to consider:

• How much guidance the participant will actually need
• How intently participants will need to focus
• How guidance or prompting from you might affect results or observations

With these things in mind, let’s look at the four approaches.

Concurrent Think Aloud (CTA)

With this approach, you’ll encourage participants to externalize their thought process—to think out loud. Your job during the session will be to keep them talking through what they’re looking for, what they’re doing and why, and what they think about the results of their actions.

A CTA approach often uncovers a lot of nuanced details in the user journey, but if your objectives include anything related to the accuracy or time for task completion, you might be better off with a Retrospective Think Aloud.

Retrospective Think Aloud (RTA)

Here, you’ll allow participants to complete their tasks and recount the journey afterward . They can complete tasks in a more realistic time frame  and degree of accuracy, though there will certainly be nuanced details of participants’ thoughts and feelings you’ll miss out on.

Concurrent Probing (CP)

With Concurrent Probing, you ask participants about their experience as they’re having it. You prompt them for details on their expectations, reasons for particular actions, and feeling about results.

This approach can be distracting, but used in combination with CTA, you can allow participants to complete the tasks and prompt only when you see a particularly interesting aspect of their experience, and you’d like to know more. Again, if accuracy and timing are critical objectives, you might be better off with Retrospective Probing.

Retrospective Probing (RP)

If you note that a participant says or does something interesting as they complete their task(s), you can note it and ask them about it later—this is Retrospective Probing. This is an approach very often combined with CTA or RTA to ensure that you’re not missing out on those nuanced details of their experience without distracting them from actually completing the task.

Whew! There’s your quick overview of performance testing. To learn more about it, read to the final section of this article: How to learn more about usability testing.

With this under our belts, let’s move on to our other four essential usability testing methods.

Card sorting is a way of testing the usability of your information architecture. You give users blank cards (open card sorting) or cards labeled with the names and short descriptions of the main items/sections of the product (closed card sorting), then ask them to sort the cards into piles according to which items seem to go best together. You can go even further by asking them to sort the cards into larger groups and to name the groups or piles.

Rather than structuring your site or app according to your understanding of the product, card sorting allows the information architecture to mirror the way your users are thinking.

This is a great technique to employ very early in the design process as it is inexpensive and will save the time and expense of making structural adjustments later in the process. And there’s no technology required! If you want to conduct it remotely, though, there are tools like OptimalSort that do this effectively.

For more on how to conduct card sorting, watch this video:

Tree testing is a great follow up to card sorting, but it can be conducted on its own as well. In tree testing, you create a visual information hierarchy (or “tree) and ask users to complete a task using the tree. For example, you might ask users, “You want to accomplish X with this product. Where do you go to do that?” Then you observe how easily users are able to find what they’re looking for.

This is another great technique to employ early in the design process. It can be conducted with paper prototypes or spreadsheets, but you can also use tools such as TreeJack to accomplish this digitally and remotely.

In the 5-second test, you expose your users to one portion of your product (one screen, probably the top half of it) for five seconds and then interview them to see what they took away regarding:

• The product/page’s purpose and main features or elements
• The intended audience and trustworthiness of the brand
• Their impression of the usability and design of the product

You can conduct this kind of testing in person rather simply, or remotely with tools like UsabilityHub .

This one may seem somewhat new, but it’s been around for a while–though the tools and technology around it have evolved. Eye tracking on its own isn’t enough to determine usability, but it’s a great compliment to your other usability testing measures.

In eye tracking you literally track where most users’ eyes land on the screen you’re designing. The reason this is important is that you want to make sure that the elements users’ eyes are drawn to are the ones that communicate the most important information. This is a difficult one to conduct in any kind of analog fashion, but there are a lot of tools out there that make it simple— CrazyEgg and HotJar are both great places to start.

6. How to learn more about usability testing

There you have it: your 15-minute overview of the what, why, and how of usability testing. But don’t stop here! Usability testing and UX research as a whole have a deeply humanizing impact on the design process. It’s a fascinating field to discover and the result of this kind of work has the power of keeping companies, design teams, and even the lone designer accountable to what matters most: the needs of the end user.

If you’d like to learn more about usability testing and UX research, take the free UX Research for Beginners Course with CareerFoundry. This tutorial is jam-packed with information that will give you a deeper understanding of the value of this kind of testing as well as a number of other UX research methods.

You can also enroll in a UX design course or bootcamp to get a comprehensive understanding of the entire UX design process (to which usability testing and UX research are an integral part). For guidance on the best programs, check out our list of the 10 best UX design certification programs . And if you’ve already started your learning process, and you’re thinking about the job hunt, here are the top 5 UX research interview questions to be ready for.

For further reading about usability testing and UX research, check out these other articles:

• How to conduct usability testing: a step-by-step guide
• What does a UX researcher actually do? The ultimate career guide
• 11 usability heuristics every designer should know
• How to conduct a UX audit

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The ultimate guide to usability testing for UX in 2024

In this guide, we’ll show you exactly what usability testing is, why it matters, and how you can conduct your usability testing for more effective product design.

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When designing a new product or feature, you want to make sure that it’s usable and user-friendly before you get it developed. And, even once a product has launched, it’s important to continuously evaluate and improve the user experience it provides.

This can be done through usability testing: putting your product or feature in front of real people and observing how easy (or difficult) it is for them to use it. 

You can’t build great products without usability testing. In this guide, we’ll show you exactly what usability testing is, why it matters, and how you can conduct your own usability testing for more effective product design.

What is usability testing?

Usability testing is a user-centred research method aimed at evaluating the usability of digital products. 

It involves watching users as they complete specific tasks. This enables researchers and designers to see whether the product is easy to use, whether users enjoy it, and what usability issues might exist with the product. UX designers can then update and improve the product as necessary. 

For example: imagine you’re testing an e-commerce app’s checkout process. You observe several users as they attempt to purchase something, and in the process, uncover issues like unclear form fields and confusing payment options. Based on these observations, you can improve the checkout process by simplifying the language used in the forms and presenting the payment options more clearly. 

Why is usability testing important in UX?

Usability testing enables you to identify design and usability flaws you might otherwise miss. Most importantly, it provides you with first-hand insights from your target users—the people you’re designing the product for. And that’s invaluable if you want to create an effective and enjoyable user experience!

Through usability testing, you can:

• Validate ideas : Usability testing can start as soon as UX designers have a prototype or rough draft of the product. This kind of testing can help UX designers validate whether their ideas are working before they’ve gone too far with them (i.e. before spending time and money developing and launching them!)
• Identify usability problems : Users can find usability problems that UX designers have overlooked, from navigation errors to finding something on a particular page. By having users identify these problems, UX designers can adjust and deliver a better product.
• Understand user behaviour : Observing the behaviour of the product’s target users can provide insight into how they will navigate and interact with your product. Even if they don’t find any usability errors on a given test, understanding their users will help UX designers provide an optimal user experience.
• Reduce costs and save time: Usability testing delivers significant cost savings by resolving potential issues before going to market. Allowing actual users to inform and guide the development process can prevent costly failures and streamline the time the design process takes.

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When should you conduct usability testing for UX?

Usability testing is a flexible testing method, and therefore can be used at any point in the design process . You can conduct usability tests on early prototypes, later in the design process on live apps or websites, or during redesigns. 

While conducting usability tests can be expensive, it’s much more cost-effective than the alternative: spending time and money getting the product or feature developed, only to find that it doesn’t work as intended and needs to be redesigned and rebuilt.   

Usability testing should feature continuously throughout the product design process. Run usability tests to ensure that your early ideas and designs are indeed usable and user-friendly, and continue to run usability tests even after the product is launched. This will help you to improve the product—and the user experience it provides—on an ongoing basis. 

What are the different types of usability testing?

There are several types of usability testing to choose from, and they each have benefits of their own.

Qualitative vs. quantitative usability testing

Qualitative testing focuses on the question of “Why?” Why do people like or dislike something? Why do they find something easy or difficult to use? 

Quantitative testing focuses on the question of “How many?” with a focus on hard numbers and statistics, such as the time it takes a user to perform a particular task or press a particular button. 

Both quantitative and qualitative usability testing have their benefits. Quantitative usability testing gives us objective, measurable data which is easier to analyse. Qualitative usability testing allows us to dive deeper into the users’ needs, expectations, and subjective experience in relation to the product. Most designers and researchers will conduct a mixture of both where possible. 

In-person vs. remote usability testing

In-person testing takes place in the same room with the user and the researcher face-to-face. This kind of testing can be more time-consuming and expensive, but there’s nothing like seeing a person’s subtle body language as they navigate your website. 

Remote testing takes place virtually, usually over the internet. As a result, testing can take place anywhere, cutting across geographical boundaries. 

Moderated vs. unmoderated usability testing

In addition, usability testing can be moderated or unmoderated. Moderated testing mimics the circumstances of in-person testing, so the researcher can speak to the participant and observe their screen through the internet while they’re completing the test.

Unmoderated testing, on the other hand, allows the user to conduct the usability test on their own time. The user follows a list of tasks and the company is sent a recording of the test at the end of the session. This is a popular format because it requires the least amount of time. 

Traditional vs. guerrilla usability testing

In traditional usability testing, the user is approached about being in a usability test and sets up a time to come in and take it. 

Guerrilla, or hallway, usability testing is different. Researchers set up a table in a high-traffic public area, and ask random people to participate in their test right then. This allows researchers to choose people with no experience with these kinds of tests to provide feedback about their product for the first time.

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Common usability testing methods and techniques

Some of the most popular usability methods and techniques used by UX designers include:

Think-aloud protocol

To implement this method, ask users to verbalise their actions as they navigate through the test. As they describe their reasonings and issues, researchers gain insights into their usability struggles.

Heatmaps and analytics

Heatmaps provide visual representations of high engagement areas and show which areas users pay less attention to. Combining heatmaps with analytics can help you understand users’ behaviour patterns and optimise your website or app. 

Learn more: The 7 most important UX KPIs (and how to measure them) .

How to conduct usability testing for UX: A step-by-step framework

There are six steps to follow to run a usability test:

1. Define the goals of your study

Determine clear goals for your usability test—and decide how you’ll measure them. For example, if you have an e-commerce website, you might want to test how easy it is for users to purchase a product and go through the checkout process. You might measure this by evaluating how long it takes the user to complete this task (time on task) or how many errors they make (error rate).  

2. Write tasks and a script

Usability testing usually involves asking your users (or test participants) to complete a particular task. 

Writing tasks for a usability test is tricky business. You need to avoid bias in your wording and tone of voice so you don’t influence your users. As a result, you need to constantly be asking yourself: what should the user be able to do? The answer will allow you to prioritise the testing of the most important functionalities. 

For example, say you want to test the checkout process for a clothing app. You need the task to be realistic and actionable, and you don’t want to give away the solution. So a good task would be: “You are looking for a dress for a wedding. Choose the one you like, select your size, and order it.”

The results will provide you with a wealth of information about the buyer’s journey from the troubles they may have encountered to the number of people who actually managed to make a purchase. 

3. Recruit participants

There are a lot of ways to recruit people to take part in your study. You can recruit people using email newsletters or via social media for free, or you can use a paid service that will find participants for you. And remember: you don’t need more than five users if you’re doing a qualitative study. 

4. Conduct your usability test

You could conduct your study in-person, which means you will have to be present and guide the user, asking follow-up questions as required. Or you could do an unmoderated study and trust your testing script will do the job with participants. Either way, your participants should get your prepared scenarios and complete your tasks, leaving you with a ton of data to analyse.

5. Analyse results

Use all the data you gathered to analyse what users did right and wrong during the test. Make sure to pay attention to both what the user did and how it made them feel. Analysis should give you an idea of the patterns of problems and help you provide recommendations to the UX team.  

6. Report your findings

Make sure to keep your goals in mind and organise everyone’s insights into a functional document. Report the main takeaways and next steps for improving your product.

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The best usability testing tools

Some of the best usability testing tools include:

• Looppanel : Looppanel streamlines usability tests, recording, transcribing, and organising your data for analysis. It also integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams to auto-record calls. It’s like having a really good research assistant right there to generate notes, annotate your transcripts, and view your analysis by question or tag. It also offers a 15-day free trial to determine if Looppanel is for you.
• Maze : Maze is for all things UX research and that includes prototype testing. It integrates standard UX tools like Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD, and it handles analytics, presenting them as a visual report. Perhaps best of all, Maze has a built-in panel of user testers, and once you release your test, they promise results in two hours. Maze is free for a single active project and up to 100 responses per month, although it costs $50/month (or about €44) for a professional plan.
• UserZoom : UserZoom is an all-purpose UX research solution for remote testing. It can handle moderated and unmoderated usability tests and integrate with platforms like Adobe XD, Miro, Jira, and more. It also has a participant recruitment engine with more than 120 million users around the world. The price of plans for UserZoom varies. 
• Reframer : Reframer is part of Optimal Workshop . It’s a complete solution for synthesising all your qualitative research findings in one place. It will help you analyse and make sense of your qualitative research. There are a variety of plans for Reframer as part of the Optimal Workshop suite of UX research tools.
• Hotjar : If you decide to do a heatmap study as part of your usability testing, you can use Hotjar to create heatmaps and capture the way people are using your website. You can also get real-time user feedback and screen recordings to see how people interact with your app. But remember, if you’re doing heatmaps for usability testing, you’ll need at least 39 users to take your test. Hotjar has a basic free plan that is fairly extensive as well as a number of paid plans.

Usability testing for UX: best practices

There’s a lot to do when you’re running a usability test. Here are some best practices to ensure your usability tests are effective: 

1. Get participants’ consent

Before you start your usability test, you must get consent from your users. Participants often don’t know why they’re participating in a usability study. As a result, you must inform them and get their sign off to use the data they provide.

2. Bring in a broader demographic

Make sure you recruit people with different perspectives on your product to your test. You should bring in people from different demographics and market segments to give you different perspectives on your product. Each demographic will have something different to point out.

3. Pilot testing is important

To ensure your usability test is in good shape,  run a pilot test of your study with someone who was not involved in the project. This could be another person in your department or a friend. Either way, this will help you solve any issues you’re having before you do an official usability test.

Pilot tests are especially important for remote or unmoderated usability tests because test participants will rely heavily on your instructions in these circumstances. 

4. Know your goals

Make sure you know what your exact goals are and when the results qualify as a failure. Knowing this in advance will help you run an effective usability study.

5. Consider the length of the test

While you may be able to spend all day testing your product, users aren’t so patient. Make sure the tasks you’ve chosen for your usability study are enough to ensure you’re confident with the results, but not so much that your users are exhausted. If necessary, you can run multiple tests. Remember: asking too much from your participants will lead to poor test results. 

Usability testing is crucial to UX designers. Learn more about usability testing by checking out these articles: 

• Are user research and UX research the same thing?
• The importance of user research in UX design
• How to incorporate user feedback in product design (and why it matters)

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Usability Testing

What is usability testing.

Usability testing is the practice of testing how easy a design is to use with a group of representative users. It usually involves observing users as they attempt to complete tasks and can be done for different types of designs. It is often conducted repeatedly, from early development until a product’s release.

“It’s about catching customers in the act, and providing highly relevant and highly contextual information.”

— Paul Maritz, CEO at Pivotal

• Transcript loading…

Usability Testing Leads to the Right Products

Through usability testing, you can find design flaws you might otherwise overlook. When you watch how test users behave while they try to execute tasks, you’ll get vital insights into how well your design/product works. Then, you can leverage these insights to make improvements. Whenever you run a usability test, your chief objectives are to:

1) Determine whether testers can complete tasks successfully and independently .

2) Assess their performance and mental state as they try to complete tasks, to see how well your design works.

3) See how much users enjoy using it.

4) Identify problems and their severity .

5) Find solutions .

While usability tests can help you create the right products, they shouldn’t be the only tool in your UX research toolbox. If you just focus on the evaluation activity, you won’t improve the usability overall.

There are different methods for usability testing. Which one you choose depends on your product and where you are in your design process.

Usability Testing is an Iterative Process

To make usability testing work best, you should:

a. Define what you want to test . Ask yourself questions about your design/product. What aspect/s of it do you want to test? You can make a hypothesis from each answer. With a clear hypothesis, you’ll have the exact aspect you want to test.

b. Decide how to conduct your test – e.g., remotely. Define the scope of what to test (e.g., navigation) and stick to it throughout the test. When you test aspects individually, you’ll eventually build a broader view of how well your design works overall.

2) Set user tasks –

a. Prioritize the most important tasks to meet objectives (e.g., complete checkout), no more than 5 per participant. Allow a 60-minute timeframe.

b. Clearly define tasks with realistic goals .

c. Create scenarios where users can try to use the design naturally . That means you let them get to grips with it on their own rather than direct them with instructions.

3) Recruit testers – Know who your users are as a target group. Use screening questionnaires (e.g., Google Forms) to find suitable candidates. You can advertise and offer incentives . You can also find contacts through community groups , etc. If you test with only 5 users, you can still reveal 85% of core issues.

4) Facilitate/Moderate testing – Set up testing in a suitable environment . Observe and interview users . Notice issues . See if users fail to see things, go in the wrong direction or misinterpret rules. When you record usability sessions, you can more easily count the number of times users become confused. Ask users to think aloud and tell you how they feel as they go through the test. From this, you can check whether your designer’s mental model is accurate: Does what you think users can do with your design match what these test users show?

If you choose remote testing , you can moderate via Google Hangouts, etc., or use unmoderated testing. You can use this software to carry out remote moderated and unmoderated testing and have the benefit of tools such as heatmaps.

Keep usability tests smooth by following these guidelines.

1) Assess user behavior – Use these metrics:

Quantitative – time users take on a task, success and failure rates, effort (how many clicks users take, instances of confusion, etc.)

Qualitative – users’ stress responses (facial reactions, body-language changes, squinting, etc.), subjective satisfaction (which they give through a post-test questionnaire) and perceived level of effort/difficulty

2) Create a test report – Review video footage and analyzed data. Clearly define design issues and best practices. Involve the entire team.

Overall, you should test not your design’s functionality, but users’ experience of it . Some users may be too polite to be entirely honest about problems. So, always examine all data carefully.

Learn More about Usability Testing

Take our course on usability testing .

Here’s a quick-fire method to conduct usability testing .

See some real-world examples of usability testing .

Take some helpful usability testing tips .

Questions related to Usability Testing

To conduct usability testing effectively:

Start by defining clear, objective goals and recruit representative users.

Develop realistic tasks for participants to perform and set up a controlled, neutral environment for testing.

Observe user interactions, noting difficulties and successes, and gather qualitative and quantitative data.

After testing, analyze the results to identify areas for improvement.

For a comprehensive understanding and step-by-step guidance on conducting usability testing, refer to our specialized course on Conducting Usability Testing .

Conduct usability testing early and often, from the design phase to development and beyond. Early design testing uncovers issues when they are more accessible and less costly to fix. Regular assessments throughout the project lifecycle ensure continued alignment with user needs and preferences. Usability testing is crucial for new products and when redesigning existing ones to verify improvements and discover new problem areas. Dive deeper into optimal timing and methods for usability testing in our detailed article “Usability: A part of the User Experience.”

Incorporate insights from William Hudson, CEO of Syntagm, to enhance usability testing strategies. William recommends techniques like tree testing and first-click testing for early design phases to scrutinize navigation frameworks. These methods are exceptionally suitable for isolating and evaluating specific components without visual distractions, focusing strictly on user understanding of navigation. They're advantageous for their quantitative nature, producing actionable numbers and statistics rapidly, and being applicable at any project stage. Ideal for both new and existing solutions, they help identify problem areas and assess design elements effectively.

To conduct usability testing for a mobile application:

Start by identifying the target users and creating realistic tasks for them.

Collect data on their interactions and experiences to uncover issues and areas for improvement.

For instance, consider the concept of ‘tappability’ as explained by Frank Spillers, CEO: focusing on creating task-oriented, clear, and easily tappable elements is crucial.

Employing correct affordances and signifiers, like animations, can clarify interactions and enhance user experience, avoiding user frustration and errors. Dive deeper into mobile usability testing techniques and insights by watching our insightful video with Frank Spillers.

For most usability tests, the ideal number of participants depends on your project’s scope and goals. Our video featuring William Hudson, CEO of Syntagm, emphasizes the importance of quality in choosing participants as it significantly impacts the usability test's results.

He shares insightful experiences and stresses on carefully selecting and recruiting participants to ensure constructive and reliable feedback. The process involves meticulous planning and execution to identify and discard data from non-contributive participants and to provide meaningful and trustworthy insights are gathered to improve the interactive solution, be it an app or a website. Remember the emphasis on participant's attentiveness and consistency while performing tasks to avoid compromising the results. Watch the full video for a more comprehensive understanding of participant recruitment and usability testing.

To analyze usability test results effectively, first collate the data meticulously. Next, identify patterns and recurrent issues that indicate areas needing improvement. Utilize quantitative data for measurable insights and qualitative data for understanding user behavior and experience. Prioritize findings based on their impact on user experience and the feasibility of implementation. For a deeper understanding of analysis methods and to ensure thorough interpretation, refer to our comprehensive guides on Analyzing Qualitative Data and Usability Testing . These resources provide detailed insights, aiding in systematically evaluating and optimizing user interaction and interface design.

Usability testing is predominantly qualitative, focusing on understanding users' thoughts and experiences, as highlighted in our video featuring William Hudson, CEO of Syntagm. 

It enables insights into users' minds, asking why things didn't work and what's going through their heads during the testing phase. However, specific methods, like tree testing and first-click testing , present quantitative aspects, providing hard numbers and statistics on user performance. These methods can be executed at any design stage, providing actionable feedback and revealing navigation and visual design efficacy.

To conduct remote usability testing effectively, establish clear objectives, select the right tools, and recruit participants fitting your user profile. Craft tasks that mirror real-life usage and prepare concise instructions. During the test, observe users’ interactions and note their challenges and behaviors. For an in-depth understanding and guide on performing unmoderated remote usability testing, refer to our comprehensive article, Unmoderated Remote Usability Testing (URUT): Every Step You Take, We Won’t Be Watching You .

Some people use the two terms interchangeably, but User Testing and Usability Testing, while closely related, serve distinct purposes. User Testing focuses on understanding users' perceptions, values, and experiences, primarily exploring the 'why' behind users' actions. It is crucial for gaining insights into user needs, preferences, and behaviors, as elucidated by Ann Blanford, an HCI professor, in our enlightening video. 

She elaborates on the significance of semi-structured interviews in capturing users' attitudes and explanations regarding their actions. Usability Testing primarily assesses users' ability to achieve their goals efficiently and complete specific tasks with satisfaction, often emphasizing the ease of interface use. Balancing both methods is pivotal for comprehensively understanding user interaction and product refinement.

Usability testing is crucial as it determines how usable your product is, ensuring it meets user expectations. It allows creators to validate designs and make informed improvements by observing real users interacting with the product. Benefits include:

Clarity and focus on user needs.

Avoiding internal bias.

Providing valuable insights to achieve successful, user-friendly designs. 

By enrolling in our Conducting Usability Testing course, you’ll gain insights from Frank Spillers, CEO of Experience Dynamics, extensive experience learning to develop test plans, recruit participants, and convey findings effectively.

Explore our dedicated Usability Expert Learning Path at Interaction Design Foundation to learn Usability Testing. We feature a specialized course, Conducting Usability Testing , led by Frank Spillers, CEO of Experience Dynamics. This course imparts proven methods and practical insights from Frank's extensive experience, guiding you through creating test plans, recruiting participants, moderation, and impactful reporting to refine designs based on the results. Engage with our quality learning materials and expert video lessons to become proficient in usability testing and elevate user experiences!

Answer a Short Quiz to Earn a Gift

What is the primary purpose of usability testing?

• To assess how easily users can use a product and complete tasks
• To document the number of users visiting a product’s webpage
• To test the market viability of a new product

At what stage should designers conduct usability testing?

• Only after the product is fully developed
• Only during the initial concept phase
• Throughout all stages of product development

Why do designers perform usability testing multiple times during the development process?

• To increase the product cost
• To lengthen the development timeline
• To refine the design based on user feedback and improve user satisfaction

What type of data does usability testing typically generate?

• Only qualitative
• Only quantitative

Which method is a common practice in usability testing?

• To ask users only closed-ended questions post-test
• To observe users as they perform tasks without intervention
• To provide users with solutions before testing

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Literature on Usability Testing

Here’s the entire UX literature on Usability Testing by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Usability Testing

Take a deep dive into Usability Testing with our course Conducting Usability Testing .

Do you know if your website or app is being used effectively? Are your users completely satisfied with the experience? What is the key feature that makes them come back? In this course, you will learn how to answer such questions—and with confidence too—as we teach you how to justify your answers with solid evidence .

Great usability is one of the key factors to keep your users engaged and satisfied with your website or app. It is crucial you continually undertake usability testing and perceive it as a core part of your development process if you want to prevent abandonment and dissatisfaction. This is especially important when 79% of users will abandon a website if the usability is poor, according to Google! As a designer, you also have another vital duty—you need to take the time to step back, place the user at the center of the development process and evaluate any underlying assumptions. It’s not the easiest thing to achieve, particularly when you’re in a product bubble, and that makes usability testing even more important. You need to ensure your users aren’t left behind!

As with most things in life, the best way to become good at usability testing is to practice! That’s why this course contains not only lessons built on evidence-based approaches, but also a practical project . This will give you the opportunity to apply what you’ve learned from internationally respected Senior Usability practitioner, Frank Spillers, and carry out your own usability tests .

By the end of the course, you’ll have hands-on experience with all stages of a usability test project— how to plan, run, analyze and report on usability tests . You can even use the work you create during the practical project to form a case study for your portfolio, to showcase your usability test skills and experience to future employers!

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Task-Based Usability Testing: Key to Product Development Success

Optimize product success with usability testing. Dive into task-based testing and uncover user preferences, navigational woes, and more. In this article, learn about the importance of usability testing as well as its types and uses.

Product development success is in large part due to the efforts put into usability testing. It assists in locating and resolving product usability issues, which can enhance user experience and engagement. Task-based usability testing evaluates a product’s usability by having users complete specific tasks. User preferences, navigational issues, and points of confusion can all be uncovered through this method. This article will discuss the definition of task-based usability testing, its benefits, different types of tests, when to use it, how to conduct a test, and examples.

What is Task-Based Usability Testing?

Task-based usability testing focuses on how users interact with a product when they are completing particular tasks. It is used to determine how effectively a product satisfies user needs and to pinpoint areas where the product could be improved. Users are required to execute a set of tasks during these tests, such as completing a form, navigating a website, or making a transaction. The product is then modified to enhance the user experience based on the test’s findings.

Task-Based Usability Testing Benefits

The development of products can benefit greatly from task-based usability testing. It can be useful to pinpoint usability problems like unclear navigation, unclear directions, or unclear information. This can lead to better use of resources and lower development costs. On the list of pros for task-based usability testing is that it aids in finding out what features are most useful to users or what kind of information they prefer to view. Decisions about future product iterations can benefit from this.

The performance of product design choices can also be assessed through usability testing. For instance, it can be used to compare different websites or alternative designs to choose the one that is most user-friendly. In doing so, you can make sure that the product is designed in such a way that users can easily comprehend and use.

Types of Task-Based Usability Testing

Usability testing can be divided into two main types: qualitative and quantitative. Inquiries into consumers’ subjective opinions of a product or service are the main goal of qualitative usability testing. Open Analytics is a testing technique that Useberry offers, in which users are asked to self-report when they believe that they have completed the task. Understanding the user’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as they interact with the product is the aim of qualitative usability testing.

Comparatively, quantitative usability testing focuses on gathering metrics about users’ success rates and time spent on tasks while using a product. Larger participant groups are often included in this kind of testing, which can also use techniques like Single Task tests that aim to evaluate a product’s usability by asking users to accomplish one or more tasks, such as completing a form.

With the use of Video Shoots , both Open Analytics and Single Task tests can gain qualitative data by observing the user’s face, voice, and screen. Both kinds of usability testing are crucial for comprehending the user experience and developing products that are simple to use and satisfy user needs.

When to Use Task-Based Usability Testing

Incorporating usability testing at multiple points in the development process is essential. You could use it throughout the design phase to try out alternative concepts and check for usability issues before the product goes into production. With Useberry , you can import your design or prototype and start testing immediately. Testing a product during development or after it has been released allows you to assess the quality of the user experience and locate areas for growth and any unresolved usability issues. With website usability testing , you can find out how real people use your live product.

How to Conduct a Task-Based Usability Test

Conducting a usability test based on a set of tasks requires a number of different actions to be taken.

Step 1: Create a test plan

This should contain a list of the tasks the user will be required to perform as well as any guidelines for doing so. The tasks should be relevant to the product, and participants should receive clear instructions on how to complete them. Learn how to write usability test tasks that are practical and motivate action.

Giving participants adequate time to finish the activities is crucial, too. Participants may grow discouraged, and the findings may be misleading if the tasks are excessively difficult or lengthy.

Step 2: Create a realistic task test

With the use of a user testing tool, such as Useberry, it’s easy to set up and saves you time and money. Follow these six steps by using Useberry’s Single Task Block to create a task-based test:

• Create an account
• Select a prototype or website from your library
• Fill in the action you want participants to take
• Let participants know more about the context of their task
• Set the screen your prototype or website will begin with
• Select when this task is successfully completed

Step 3: Pilot test before sharing

Before distributing a usability test to participants, developing a pilot test can be an essential step in ensuring the study’s success. This can help find and fix any issues with the test’s design, instructions, or materials while also ensuring that the test is appropriate for the intended audience. The study’s feasibility can be tested, and any necessary alterations can be made, based on factors like the time needed to complete the test.

Step 4: Recruit participants for the test

Identifying your target audience is crucial for producing accurate data from your usability tests. The participants should be representative of the target market if the product is designed for that group. Consider characteristics like age, place of residence, work, and interests of your users. Once your target audience has been identified, you can use Useberry’s Participant Pool to recruit vetted and verified participants for your test. There are more than 100 targeting attributes to choose from, and you can start collecting data right away. Another option is to share a link to your test with your audience via your own channels, like email and social media. To find out how many users you should test with, read here .

Step 4: Evaluate the findings

To improve the user experience, the product should be modified in light of the findings. By observing participants as they complete the tasks, you can determine by their clicks, taps, and scrolls where they got confused or stuck with the session recordings Useberry provides.

You can identify areas for improvement by looking at how many participants completed a task, how long they spent on it, and how often they misclicked. By visualizing the path a user follows from one screen to the next with User Flows , you can discover how your users behave and which screens they’re on when they decide to leave.

Click tracking shows you exactly where users click or tap on your prototype or website’s UI.

Examples of Task-based Usability Testing

Task-based usability testing has various applications. A great example is evaluating a website’s usability. This could entail asking visitors to perform actions like using the website, completing a form, or looking up information. Watch our how-to video on setting up and testing a website’s usability with a real-life example. Another example is evaluating a mobile app’s usability. This might include asking users to perform actions, including starting the program, using the menus, and completing a task.

Product success depends on usability testing to identify areas for improvement. It can be used to determine user preferences, assess the success of product design decisions, and find usability problems. The effectiveness of various designs or features can also be determined by conducting usability tests. Use Useberry to track tasks and results during a usability test and ensure the tasks are relevant to the product. This article will enable product teams to get reliable and actionable task-based usability testing results.

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Open and Closed Card Sorting Explained

21 Terms Everyone in the UX Design Industry Should Know

• What is task analysis?

Last updated

28 February 2023

Reviewed by

Miroslav Damyanov

Every business and organization should understand the needs and challenges of its customers, members, or users. Task analysis allows you to learn about users by observing their behavior. The process can be applied to many types of actions, such as tracking visitor behavior on websites, using a smartphone app, or completing a specific action such as filling out a form or survey.

In this article, we'll look at exactly what task analysis is, why it's so valuable, and provide some examples of how it is used.

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Task analysis is learning about users by observing their actions. It entails breaking larger tasks into smaller ones so you can track the specific steps users take to complete a task.

Task analysis can be useful in areas such as the following:

Website users signing up for a mailing list or free trial. Track what steps visitors typically take, such as where they find your site and how many pages they visit before taking action. You'd also track the behavior of visitors who leave without completing the task.

Teaching children to read. For example, a task analysis for second-graders may identify steps such as matching letters to sounds, breaking longer words into smaller chunks, and teaching common suffixes such as "ing" and "ies." 

• Benefits of task analysis

There are several benefits to using task analysis for understanding user behavior:

Simplifies long and complex tasks

Allows for the introduction of new tasks

Reduces mistakes and improves efficiency

Develops a customized approach

• Types of task analysis

There are two main categories of task analysis, cognitive and hierarchical.

Cognitive task analysis

Cognitive task analysis, also known as procedural task analysis, is concerned with understanding the steps needed to complete a task or solve a problem. It is visualized as a linear diagram, such as a flowchart. This is used for fairly simple tasks that can be performed sequentially.

Hierarchical task analysis

Hierarchical task analysis identifies a hierarchy of goals or processes. This is visualized as a top-to-bottom process, where the user needs top-level knowledge to proceed to subsequent tasks. A hierarchical task analysis is top-to-bottom, as in Google's example following the user journey of a student completing a class assignment .

What is the difference between cognitive and hierarchical task analysis?

There are a few differences between cognitive and hierarchical task analysis. While cognitive task analysis is concerned with the user experience when performing tasks, hierarchical task analysis looks at how each part of a system relates to the whole.

• When to use task analysis

A task analysis is useful for any project where you need to know as much as possible about the user experience. To be helpful, you need to perform a task analysis early in the process before you invest too much time or money into features or processes you'll need to change later.

You can take what you learn from task analysis and apply it to other user design processes such as website design , prototyping , wireframing , and usability testing .

• How to conduct a task analysis

There are several steps involved in conducting a task analysis.

Identify one major goal (the task) you want to learn about. One challenge is knowing what steps to include. If you are studying users performing a task on your website, do you want to start the analysis when they actually land on your site or earlier? You may also want to know how they got there, such as by searching on Google.

Break the main task into smaller subtasks. "Going to the store" might be separated into getting dressed, getting your wallet, leaving the house, walking or driving to the store. You can decide which sub-tasks are meaningful enough to include.

Draw a diagram to visualize the process. A diagram makes it easier to understand the process.

Write down a list of the steps to accompany the diagram to make it more useful to those who were not familiar with the tasks you analyzed.

Share and validate the results with your team to get feedback on whether your description of the tasks and subtasks, as well as the diagram, are clear and consistent.

• Task analysis in UX

One of the most valuable uses of task analysis is for improving user experience (UX) . The entire goal of UX is to identify and overcome user problems and challenges. Task analysis can be helpful in a number of ways.

Identify the steps users take when using a product. Can some of the steps be simplified or eliminated?

Finding areas in the process that users find difficult or frustrating. For example, if many users abandon a task at a certain stage, you'll want to introduce changes that improve the completion rate.

Hierarchical analysis reveals what users need to know to get from one step to the next. If there are gaps (i.e., not all users have the expertise to complete the steps), they should be filled.

• Task analysis is a valuable tool for developers and project managers

Task analysis is a process that can improve the quality of training, software, product prototypes, website design, and many other areas. By helping you identify user experience, you can make improvements and solve problems. It's a tool that you can continually refine as you observe results.

By consistently applying the most appropriate kind of task analysis (e.g., cognitive or hierarchical), you can make consistent improvements to your products and processes. Task analysis is valuable for the entire product team, including product managers , UX designers , and developers .

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Usability evaluation and analysis

Once you've finished running your usability testing sessions, it's time to evaluate the findings. In this chapter, we explain how to extract the data from your results, analyze it, and turn it into an action plan for improving your site.

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How to evaluate usability testing results [in 5 steps]

The process of turning a mass of qualitative data, transcripts, and observations into an actionable report on usability issues can seem overwhelming at first—but it's simply a matter of organizing your findings and looking for patterns and recurring issues in the data.

1. Define what you're looking for

Before  you start analyzing the results, review your original goals for testing. Remind yourself of the problem areas of your website, or pain points, that you wanted to evaluate.

Once you begin reviewing the testing data, you will be presented with hundreds, or even thousands, of user insights. Identifying your main areas of interest will help you stay focused on the most relevant feedback.

Use those areas of focus to create overarching categories of interest. Most likely, each category will correspond to one of the  tasks  that you asked users to complete during testing. They may be things like: logging in, searching for an item, or going through the payment process, etc.

2. Organize the data

Review your testing sessions one by one. Watch the recordings, read the transcripts, and carefully go over your notes.

Issues the user encountered while performing tasks

Actions they took

Comments (both positive and negative) they made

For each issue a user discovered, or unexpected action they took, make a separate note. Record the task the user was attempting to complete and the exact problem they encountered, and add specific categories and tags (for example, location tags such as  check out  or  landing page,  or experience-related ones such as  broken element  or  hesitation ) so you can later sort and filter. If you previously created  user personas  or testing groups, record that here as well.

It's best to do this digitally, with a tool like Excel or Airtable, as you want to be able to move the data around, apply tags, and sort it by category.

Pro tip: make sure your statements are concise and exactly describe the issue.

Bad example: the user clicked on the wrong link

Good example: the user clicked on the link for Discounts Codes instead of the one for Payment Info

When you're done, your data might look similar to this:

3. Draw conclusions

Assess your data with both  qualitative and quantitative measures :

Quantitative analysis will give you statistics that can be used to identify the presence and severity of issues

Qualitative analysis will give you an insight into why the issues exist, and how to fix them.

In most usability studies, your focus and the bulk of your findings will be qualitative, but calculating some key numbers can give your findings credibility and provide baseline metrics for evaluating future iterations of the website.

Quantitative data analysis

Extract hard numbers from the data to employ quantitative data analysis. Figures like rankings and statistics will help you determine where the most common issues are on your website and their severity.

Quantitative data metrics for user testing include:

Success rate: the percentage of users in the testing group who ultimately completed the assigned task

Error rate : the percentage of users that made or encountered the same error

Time to complete task : the average time it took to complete a given task

Satisfaction rankings : an average of users' self-reported satisfaction measured on a numbered scale

Qualitative data analysis

Qualitative data is just as, if not more, important than quantitative analysis because it helps to illustrate why certain problems are happening, and how they can be fixed. Such anecdotes and insights will help you come up with solutions to increase usability.

Sort the data in your spreadsheet so that issues involving the same tasks are grouped together. This will give you an idea of how many users experienced problems with a certain step (e.g., check out) and the overlap of these problems. Look for patterns and repetitions in the data to help identify recurring issues.

Keep a running tally of each issue, and how common it was. You are creating a list of problems with the website. For example, you may find that several users had issues with entering their payment details on the checkout page. If they all encountered the same problem, then conclude that there is an issue that needs to be resolved.

Try and broaden the insight if it isn’t exactly identical with another, but is still strongly related. For example, a user who could not find a support phone number to call and another who couldn’t find an email address should be grouped together, with the overall conclusion that contact details for the company were difficult to find.

4. Prioritize the issues

Now that you have a list of problems, rank them based on their impact, if solved. Consider how global the problem is throughout the site, and how severe it is; acknowledge the implications of specific problems when extended sitewide (e.g., if one page is full of typos, you should probably get the rest of the site proofread as well).

Categorize the problems into:

Critical: impossible for users to complete tasks

Serious: frustrating for many users

Minor: annoying, but not going to drive users away

For example: being unable to complete payments is a more urgent issue than disliking the site's color scheme. The first is a critical issue that should be corrected immediately, while the second is a minor issue that can be put on the back burner for some time in the future.

5. Compile a report of your results

To benefit from  website usability testing , you must ultimately use the results to improve your site. Once you've evaluated the data and prioritized the most common issues, leverage those insights to encourage positive changes to your site's usability.

In some cases, you may have the power to just make the changes yourself. In other situations, you may need to make your case to higher-ups at your company—and when that happens, you’ll likely need to draft a report that explains the problems you discovered and your proposed solutions.

Qualities of an effective usability report

It's not enough to simply present the raw data to decision-makers and hope it inspires change. A good report should:

Showcase the highest priority issues

. Don't just present a laundry list of everything that went wrong. Focus on the most pressing issues.

Be specific . It's not enough to simply say “users had difficulty with entering payment information.” Identify the specific area of design, interaction, or flow that caused the problem.

Include evidence . Snippets of videos, screenshots, or transcripts from actual tests can help make your point (for certain stakeholders, actually seeing someone struggle is more effective than simply hearing about it secondhand). Consider presenting your report in slideshow form, instead of as a written document, for this reason.

Present solutions. Brainstorm solutions for the highest priority issues. There are usually many ways to attack any one problem. For example: if your problem is that users don't understand the shipping options, that could be a design issue or a copywriting issue. It will be up to you and your team to figure out the most efficient change to shift  user behavior in the direction you desire.

Include positive findings . In addition to the problems you've identified, include any meaningful positive feedback you received. This helps the team know what is working well so they can maintain those features in future website iterations.

Visit our page on  reporting templates  for more guidance on how to structure your findings.

Acting on your usability testing analysis

After the recommended changes have been decided on and implemented, continue to test their effectiveness, either through another round of usability testing, or using A/B testing. Compare feedback and statistics on success rates to evaluate the changes and confirm that they fixed the problem. Continue refining and retesting until all the issues have been resolved—at which point… you’ll be ready to start with usability testing all over again.

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Task-based Usability Testing + Example Task Scenario

TABLE OF CONTENTS

User experience is an incredibly important aspect of digital products nowadays. When failing to continuously test and optimize the usability of your website it may seem chaotic or out of date. With  usability testing  studies you can get valuable insights and user feedback, and make design decisions based on reliable data , rather than guesswork.

Today we will be focusing on task-driven usability tests. We will talk about what benefits usability testing and how you can implement it remotely within minutes with our ready-to-go example and a 10-step process to running task-oriented usability studies for your websites, web apps, or prototypes.

Article Summary

➡️Usability test based on tasks involves having users complete a task (or multiple) and observing their performance, issues, and success rate

➡️Tasks should correspond with your website’s user goal(s) and imitate real-life scenarios

➡️The test can be done on high-fidelity prototypes or live websites/apps

➡️To create the tasks use actionable verbs, provide a bit of context and keep it simple

➡️ Avoid leading instructions and task formulations that give away the answer

➡️You can set up a task-oriented usability test in 10 simple steps with UXtweak’s Website Testing tool, and get a detailed analysis

🐝  Register for a free account on UXtweak now and try it out!

What is task-based usability testing?

Your customers expect to easily navigate your website, get to the products they are looking for and find all the information they need. They expect an issue-free experience while using your website. This is where they often get disappointed. As we all know, confusing and bug-ridden websites expectedly lead to low conversions , high bounce rates, etc. 

However, there are ways to combat this problem. Task-oriented usability studies combine qualitative research methods to provide you with in-depth explanations, and as much context as possible while not forgetting about important quantitative metrics and statistics. They take into account that your users need to accomplish specific goals on your website and they should be able to do so easily. 

A task-oriented usability study is built around a real-life task and scenario to simulate the real user experience and encourage users to interact with your product interface naturally. You can measure user success rate and test a website’s ability to do what it was built for – satisfying a customer from the user’s point of view and bringing conversions.

The task is simply an action you want your users to be able to complete in your interface. This type of user testing can be conducted in person or online with the help of specialized  usability testing tools .

Why you should try task-based usability tests?

Every website, web app, and mobile app is built with a goal and user goals in mind. For example, the main goal of an e-commerce website is to sell products, additional user goals could be to let users subscribe to the newsletter (to sell more products later on and create engagement).

When users experience issues stopping them from completing their goal it creates a bad brand experience , meaning your customers will be less likely to return to your store and create revenue.

Unfortunately, even the most optimized or well-coded websites don’t get this aspect perfectly, as it is next to impossible to predict the exact way your actual users will be using your digital products. To battle this problem, you need to observe how your users interact with the interface and features in the context of the real day-to-day user experience.

Task-oriented usability testing allows you to qualitatively analyze how your users go about solving the tasks set by you , why users could not complete the test tasks successfully, or what distracted them during their efforts.

When is the right time to use task-based usability testing?

It is best to incorporate this type of usability test at more stages of development , to avoid developing a product that will later need changing.

When you can think about a specific usability testing scenario, you can create usability tasks. You can then conduct a task-oriented usability study on a high-fidelity prototype with a help of a Prototype Testing tool or conduct live Website Testing  or Mobile App Testing .

It is perfect for when you are looking for detailed answers from a larger number of your users to questions such as:  

• Why does your e-commerce website have a high abandonment rate at the checkout?
• Why don’t your users sign up for your newsletter?
• What causes low conversions? 
• Is your site navigation effective and intuitive? 
• Can users find the information they are looking for about your company? etc. 

You can learn more about when to conduct usability testing in our Complete Guide to Usability Tests .

Easy Task-oriented Usability Testing with UXtweak

Test on prototypes, websites or apps and get actionable insights to improve your product! Clear reports, qualified testers and all with the most competitive pricing.

Advantages of remote task-based usability testing

• Higher completion rate due to motivation to complete the task by setting relatable scenarios (for example: Subscribe to our newsletter.)
• Testing on real day-to-day tasks that make it relatable to your users
• Realistic results when put into practice correctly
• Actionable insights to improve on 
• Less costly than in-person interviews
• Qualitative insights scalable to any number of users

Disadvantages of remote task-oriented usability tests

• Poorly prepared usability tasks can lead to skewed data and even harmful results when changes are made based on the data
• Unrelatable scenarios discourage users from completing tasks
• Possible incorrect identification of goals 
• Only makes sense to conduct on high-fidelity prototypes or finished products

How to create a task-based usability test?

Fi rstly, the most important part of well-structured task-oriented usability testing is setting the tasks correctly, so they are relatable to the testers and much easier to interpret. Creating great usability tasks is important in order to not collect skewed data. Let’s tackle that first.

Here you will find an example you can use as a stepping stone to creating your first study, making it easier for you to grasp the whole concept.

Example: Usability test for an e-commerce website

Start by setting the goals of your website. In this case, customers have to be able to order products, check and track their orders and get customer support without any difficulties. 

Some of the common mistakes e-commerce websites make that put customers off are:

• counter-intuitive filtering and searching for products
• inadequate payment methods
• bad return policy and refunds
• excessive load time of the website 
• complicated shopping cart
• long delivery time

To make sure you avoid these mistakes, we prepared these 3 sample tasks for you to start testing in no time.

Task 1: Find the least expensive smartphone in our offer and find more details about it.

Task 2: Find out whether it’s possible to use Paypal to pay in our online shop.

Task 3: Find how we can ship your order and which method is the least expensive.

How do you write tasks for usability tests?

When writing usability tasks it’s important to  focus on real-life user scenarios and their interactions with your digital product.  Define a clear goal of what you’re trying to find out in your usability test and put together a list of usability testing tasks and questions that correspond to those goals. 

When you’re conducting your first usability test with the product a great tip is to focus your tasks on some of the most common actions users take with it. You can see that in the example above where we are testing an e-commerce website, the first task asks the user to find a specific product and details about it. Testing that user scenario is a priority for an e-commerce store as one of their main user goals is to get people to find and buy their products.    

Follow a short list of guidelines we’ve outlined below to create a perfect usability task that lacks bias.  Or check our guide to  creating usability testing tasks and questions .

Guidelines for writing usability testing tasks

• Create simple realistic tasks – overly complicated tasks will lead to high abandonment rates
• Set realistic scenarios – to increase relatability and motivation to complete the task
• Use actionable verbs – the task has to encourage a user to carry out an action 
• Scenarios must not guide or hint to users on how to complete it – the test will be useless if you tell your testers how to complete it
• Leave out unnecessary pieces of information

As mentioned above, task-oriented usability testing is a powerful method when used correctly, especially in combination with pre and post-study questionnaires, think-aloud protocol, and crowd feedback.

Before conducting your first test, we recommend writing a  usability testing plan  to follow to make sure you don’t forget anything. 

It’s also good to have a working example to follow when writing tasks for your test. We gathered a couple of those to help you out. Choose the  usability testing template  that fits your needs.

Learn more about writing effective usability testing tasks in this quick YouTube video:

Let’s take a look at mistakes to avoid while writing tasks that make sense for the users, and engage them enough to carry them through your study without boring them to death. This is very important, since giving them non-engaging tasks may create several problems down the road and may create a study in which results are unusable in further research. 

How to write Task Scenarios for Usability Testing

If you’re looking to conduct a task-based usability study, it’s always good to have a working example to follow when writing tasks for your test. We gathered a couple of those to help you out. Choose the usability testing template that fits your needs.

Let’s take a look at mistakes to avoid while writing tasks that make sense for the users, and engage them enough to carry them through your study without boring them to death. This is very important, since giving them non-engaging tasks may create several problems down the road and may create a study in which results are unusable in further research. 

6 Mistakes to avoid when writing task scenarios for usability testing

1. getting too personal.

It is true that you need to understand the tester but be aware of the limitations of your relationship. You are the employer, they are the employee, and you should treat them as such. If you are asking personal questions or setting scenarios involving their loved ones, this could trigger an emotional response in the study participants, resulting in a biased study. Just follow the rule: “Let’s not bring my mother into this.”

❌ Bad example of a study question: You want to get a cake done for your mother’s birthday, buy her a cake.

✅ Good example of a study question: Get your colleague a present, due to her recent  promotion

2. Using dummy text to convey real information

Of course, when asking for their address or credit card information, use fake information, but make sure it’s realistic. Maybe you asked for their credit card information multiple times during their study, but if they simply used a fake text like “ 123 ,” they might not have noticed that you asked this question several times. Rather, when asking for their credit information use “ 0123 4567 8910 1112 ” instead.

❌ Bad example of a study question: Subscribe to our newsletter, use “ aaa ” as an email address

✅ Good example of a study question: Subscribe to our newsletter, use “ [email protected] ”

3. Being overly specific

You should be creating a scenario, not a checklist for the user to pass. Being too specific in the questions you write may result in robot-like study results, where the participants simply go through the motions. Make the participant think and find the solution themselves, you shouldn’t point them in the right direction up front. Try to write your usability tasks without giving away the correct answer and avoid leading questions.

❌ Poor task example: Use the menu to access “ Contact ,” then click on the button labeled “ Contact Us ” and send us a message.

✅ Good example of a study question: Find a way to send us a message.

4. Keep it clear and simple

Scenarios need to be believable and need to reflect the situation the users would find themselves in. Let’s not add more information that would overwhelm the participant. Just ask the users to do what you need them to do, give a little bit of a perspective, provide context, and call it a day.

❌ Bad example of a study question: You have been very interested in our newsletter recently because our product is superior to our competitors. Please fill out the form to subscribe to our newsletter.

✅ Good example of a study question: You took interest in our newsletter, please subscribe to it.

5. Using your studies as a marketing tool

While on the topic of keeping to the point. For the love of all that’s holy, try to not bring marketing to your studies. Marketing-speak is a bunch of pretty words with no additional meaning or information. Use the user’s language. Marketing, which is highly based on emotions, should not be present in your qualitative, or quantitative research. These are two separate entities, and should not be mixed.

❌ Bad example of a study question: Take a look at our newest featured product and transcribe its endless possibilities. 

✅ Good example of a study question: Find the most recent addition to our product line, and repeat the positives stated on the page.

6. Asking about the future

The future is uncertain, you never know what will happen in the future, you might be rich, broke, or dead. Asking about the future will bring skewed results, therefore ask more about the past, or the present, rather than the future. 

❌ Bad example of a study question: Would you buy this product? 

✅ Good example of a study question: Do you have any prior experience with a product similar to ours?

10-step Usability Testing process

• Register to UXtweak .
• Create a new Website Testing Study from the dashboard.
• Set the basic information – the study name, the domain you are going to conduct testing on, whether you want to protect your study by password, etc.
• Integrate UXtweak snippet to your website – use Google Tag Manager for super quick and pain-free implementation. If you are not using GTM (you should start :), it is great!) just copy your snippet into your website code below <head> on every page you wish to record on. Participants can also test your website with a UXtweak Chrome Extension, without any installation to your website, or GTMs.
• Set the start and success URL.
• Create tasks and scenarios – just copy/edit our provided example if you want to start testing in a matter of minutes! If you need to write one yourself take a look at our explanation and guidelines above or visit our blog all about asking the right questions while testing
• Set your options – UXtweak offers a lot more than just measuring task completion. You can find more about your options in Tasks Tab and how to use them here.
• Prepare questionnaires and customize messages – UXtweak comes with already prepared messages and instructions, to save you time. They are fully customizable, so feel free to customize the messages you deem fit.
• Finish the study setup – choose what information you want to collect, add your branding, set up a recruitment widget, and the setup is finished.
• Recruit participants and you are ready to launch the test!

💡Pro tip: There are many ways to get participants for your study, and some of them are even for free. Check our blog about recruiting participants for free , if you run a tight ship on a tight budget. 

Are you ready to take your website to the next level?

We’ve shown you how to set up a study, showed you an example, and listed all the benefits of using tasks in website testing. Still not sure about it? Why don’t you try it out for yourself, and see what happens when you listen to your users and adapt according to their needs.

With UXtweak you can test for these issues completely free.  Register now  and don’t miss out on the opportunity to make your website better.

Conduct Task-oriented Usability Tests with UXtweak

Easy 10-step setup process, intuitive UI, clear reports, qualified testers and all with the most competitive pricing.

People also ask (FAQ)

Task-based user testing is a type of user research where participants complete specific assignments using the tested product . These tasks mirror real-life scenarios and use cases and are used to point out any issues and improve the overall user experience .

Tasks in usability testing are specific activities or assignments that you want your participants to complete during the test . These tasks are typically based on common user goals and are used to measure the effectiveness, efficiency, and user experience of a product’s design .

It is important not to overwhelm your usability testing participants with too many tasks, because this could lead to a higher drop-off rate. It is recommended to include a maximum of 8 tasks, however, if the tasks are more complex 3-5 is better .

Tadeas Adamjak is Marketing Lead at UXtweak. His love for marketing research, working with data, and analytical mind, brought him to UXtweak where he puts these experiences into use. He has been with the company since its public launch and is in charge of ensuring customer satisfaction and getting the word out about UXtweak's cutting-edge products and services.  In addition to his marketing expertise, Tadeas is also an advocate for all things UX. He holds a Design Thinking certificate from a Google program and is currently pursuing his Master's degree in Marketing. 

UXtweak is buzzing with expert UX research, making thousands of products more user friendly every day

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Caltech Bootcamp / Blog / /

Understanding Usability Testing Methods For Effective UI/UX Design

• Written by John Terra
• Updated on May 20, 2024

Website and application developers can pour all their time, talent, and resources into creating the perfect product that functions smoothly and does everything it’s designed to. Still, if the users need help interacting with it or have bad experiences, those efforts are doomed to failure. That’s why we need usability testing methods.

This article explores UI/UX testing methods, including website usability testing. We will define the terms, detail the various types, outline testing benefits, and explain when the testing should be performed. We’ll also share a comprehensive online UI/UX program that can help aspiring designers boost their careers.

What is Usability Testing?

It is a branch of user research that evaluates user experiences when interacting with an application or website. This testing method helps designers and product teams to assess how intuitive and easy-to-use products are.

It reveals issues with the product that the designers and developers may have yet to notice by having real users complete a series of usability tasks with the product while also noting the customers’ behavior and preferences. The paths taken to complete the tasks, results, and success rate are then analyzed to highlight potential issues and areas for improvement.

The ultimate goal is to create a product that remedies the user’s problems, helping them achieve their objectives while delivering a positive experience.

Also Read: How to Design a User-Friendly Interface?

What ISN’T Usability Testing?

Now that we’ve shown what usability testing is, let’s show what it isn’t . People often need clarification on usability testing with user testing and user research. Hey, they all sound the same, right?

However, user research describes collecting insights and feedback from product users and then using this data to guide and inform product decisions. Usability testing, on the other hand, is a specific type of user research conducted to assess the usability of a product or design. So yes, it can be considered a sub-group in the user research family.

User testing is an umbrella term that can describe user research as a whole or the specific process of testing ideas and products with real users. The latter adopts a quantitative approach to collecting user feedback, usually before usability testing. However, it doesn’t provide qualitative data on why users struggle to finish tasks.

The Key Benefits of Usability Testing

It brings many benefits to the table, including:

• You can tailor products to your users. Even if you understand your product, users might have a different take. By talking to users directly and watching how they interact with and experience the product, you can better comprehend their needs and adjust the product to work for them. These changes will ultimately serve their needs and solve their issues more effectively.
• It reduces developmental costs. Usability tests save time and money by avoiding costly development mistakes. For instance, if you discover users struggle to navigate a specific feature, you can fix it before launch. Changing a product before launch rather than after release is considerably cheaper.
• It increases user satisfaction and brand reputation. It lets product teams identify potential issues and make necessary improvements before a release. This process can lead to a consistently better user experience, creating a loyal customer base and reflecting well on your overall brand reputation.
• It increases accessibility to all. Accessible products are designed and developed to be enjoyed by as many people as possible, regardless of their visual, auditory, physical, or cognitive requirements. Of course, your product must comply with codified accessibility standards and regulations, but it will also benefit from prioritizing accessibility. When you use the usability testing process to include customers with diverse needs and abilities better, you promote and contribute to a more equitable digital marketplace and landscape.
• It mitigates cognitive biases. Our minds love hastily making up shortcuts to draw quicker decisions or inferences. Although this is just an effort to be efficient, it can lead to subconscious beliefs or assumptions, otherwise known as cognitive bias. Usability testing helps remedy biases such as the false-consensus effect by offering objective feedback from actual people, ensuring that product design decisions are based on actual user behavior instead of the assumptions and opinions of the people already with the product and may already have a very subjective opinion.

When Should You Perform Usability Testing?

You must continuously perform usability testing to ensure the product stays relevant and solves the customer’s most urgent issues throughout its lifecycle. Here’s a quick summary of when to conduct it:

• Before you begin designing
• Once you have created a wireframe or prototype
• Before launching the product
• At regular intervals after the product launch

Also Read: A Guide to Improving and Measuring User Experience

The Main Usability Testing Methods

Usability testing can be split into five categories, each offering two options. In many cases, usability testers can use more than one category simultaneously.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative

• Qualitative. Qualitative testing emphasizes gathering in-depth insights and comprehending participants’ subjective experiences. It involves listening to and observing users while interacting with a service or product, identifying issues, and collecting detailed feedback.
• Quantitative. On the other hand, quantitative testing involves gathering numerical data and analyzing the measurable metrics to assess the product’s usability. The quantitative option gathers statistical information, like error rates, task completion time, and user satisfaction ratings.

Explorative vs. Comparative

• Explorative testing. Explorative testing uncovers insights and gathers feedback during the product’s early stages of development. It involves brainstorming sessions and open-ended discussions and collects participants’ thoughts, opinions, and perspectives.
• Comparative. Comparative testing compares two or more versions of the interface, service, or product to determine which offers customers a better user experience. Participants are asked to evaluate different designs or complete assigned tasks, and their feedback and preferences are collected.

Moderated vs. Unmoderated

• Moderated. As the name implies, moderated testing involves a moderator interacting with the participants, guiding them through tasks, and collecting qualitative data via questioning and observation. It can be performed in person or remotely.
• Unmoderated. Unsurprisingly, unmoderated testing is performed without a moderator. Participants independently complete tasks and provide feedback using pre-designed surveys or tests.

Remote vs. In-Person

• Remote. Remote testing occurs when the researchers and participants are in different locations. It can be moderated or unmoderated and conducted via online tools or platforms.
• In-Person. In-person testing runs usability tests with participants physically, like a usability lab or the user’s established environment.

Website vs. Mobile

• Website. Website usability testing evaluates the usability of a website or web application and typically involves testing prototypes, newly launched websites, or digital product redesigns.
• Mobile. As the name says, mobile usability testing is conducted on mobile devices. This testing evaluates the user experiences with a given mobile application or prototype. Mobile testing requires the user to install the app on their testing device and assess its usability, navigation, responsiveness, and overall mobile-specific interaction.

Usability Testing Methods

The following is a sample of specific usability testing methods broken down by their benefits, disadvantages, and when they should be run.

Guerilla Testing

This testing occurs casually and spontaneously. It typically involves user testers approaching people in coffee shops, public parks, or shopping malls.

• Benefits. Low cost, fast feedback, minimally needed resources.
• Disadvantages. It may not be as comprehensive as other testing methods.
• When to run? When you want a quick, low-effort, and cheap way of getting a random sample of opinions.

Lab Testing

As the name says, these tests are conducted in a lab or controlled environment with equipment such as eye trackers, cameras, and testing software.

• Benefits. Results in detailed analyses and precise data collection.
• Disadvantages. Time-consuming, expensive, and may not capture the spirit of real-world usage scenarios.
• When to run? When you’re looking for precision results in a controlled environment.

Card Sorting

Card sorting places concepts on virtual note cards and allows the participants to move the cards around into groups and categories. After sorting the cards, the users explain their logic in a moderated debriefing session.

• Benefits. Shows how people (potential users) organize information.
• Disadvantages. Limited information gained.
• When to run? When you want feedback on layouts and navigational structure.

Session Recording

This involves recording participants’ interactions with a system or product using screen-recording software or specialized usability testing tools. It measures things like mouse clicks, scrolling, and movement.

• Benefits. Tracks how people interact with a site, pinpoints stumbling blocks, and measures CTA effectiveness.
• Disadvantages . It may be costly and involve special tools and setup.
• When to run? When looking for possible issues with a website’s intended functionality, see how users interact with your product.

Phone Interviews

A moderator verbally guides participants in completing tasks on their computer and then collects feedback while the user’s electronic behavior is remotely recorded automatically.

• Benefits . Cost-effective, collects data from a wide geographic range, collects more data in a shorter period.
• Disadvantages. Interviewees may need help understanding instructions; only some are interested in answering their phones.
• When to run? When you want to gather test data from a large population sampling quickly.

Contextual Inquiry

This testing involves watching people in their natural contexts (e.g., home, workplace) as they interact with the product in ways they usually do. The researcher watches how the users perform their activities and asks them questions to comprehend why they acted as they did.

• Benefits. Provides valuable insights into product context and identifies usability issues that other testing methods may otherwise overlook.
• Disadvantages. Requires close collaboration with participants and risks disrupting the user’s typical daily routines.
• When to run? When results need to reflect an organic scenario in the user’s real-world circumstances.

Also Read: UI/UX Designer Salary: What Can You Expect in 2024?

Before You Begin Usability Testing

Before initiating usability testing methods, the team should ask these questions:

• What’s the goal?
• What results does the team expect?
• Who will conduct the testing?
• Where will the team find the participants?
• What usability testing software tools, if any, will be used?
• How will the results be analyzed?
• Which testing method will be used?

How to Conduct Usability Testing

When you’re ready to start, follow these simple steps.

• Planning. In this initial stage, you define the testing’s goals and objectives. The test plan specifies the target audience, tasks to be performed, schedule, test environment, and needed resources. The testing scope should be clearly outlined, and any necessary specific test methods or tools, such as usability testing software, should be decided upon.
• Recruitment. Assemble the testing team based on the requirements outlined in the previous phase’s test plan. The team typically comprises end-users representing the target audience and test engineers conducting the testing. Team members actively participate in all test sessions and supply valuable feedback designed to improve the product’s usability.
• Test Execution. Now, we get to the actual testing! The test team executes the planned test cases, following the details outlined in the test plan from the first phase. The team sets up the test environment, and the users are guided through their tasks while the team observes and records their interactions. The team also notes any issues or difficulties encountered by the users.
• Test Results. The data gathered during the test execution phase is now compiled and analyzed to identify problems, issues, and areas for improvement. This analysis categorizes and prioritizes the identified issues based on severity and how they impact the user experience. The test results will supply valuable insights into the product’s usability strengths and weaknesses.
• Data Analysis. The collected data is now analyzed in detail to extract meaningful, actionable information. This process involves reviewing the recorded survey responses, user interactions, and qualitative or quantitative data collected during the testing phase. Analysis helps uncover trends, patterns, and specific usability problems to be addressed, often by leveraging usability testing software.
• Reporting. The usability test report documents the findings and recommendations from the data analysis. It includes an analysis or summary of the test objectives, methodology used, identified issues, and suggested improvements. The report may also include video recordings, screenshots, or other supporting evidence to showcase the identified issues. The report is then circulated among relevant stakeholders, such as designers, developers, and project managers, to guide further usability improvements.
• Repeat as needed. Repeat the entire process until the product or service passes with flying colors.

Do You Want to Acquire Key UI/UX Design Skills?

If you want to gain valuable user interface and experience design skills, consider this intense UI/UX bootcamp . This 20-week professional training offers live online classes, capstone projects, a designer toolkit, and Dribble portfolio creation as you learn how to effectively use design tools like Balsamiq, Figma, Invision, Mural, and Sketch.

Glassdoor.com shows that UI/UX designers earn an average yearly salary of $88,246. So, if you want to expand your skill set or try a new career, check out this highly effective UI/UX design bootcamp and gain the necessary skills to build top-notch products for today’s digital-savvy market.

You might also like to read:

How to Become a UI UX Designer: A Comprehensive Guide

UI UX Designer Career Path: A Comprehensive Guide

All About UI UX Design Principles

Accessibility in UX Design: A Definitive Guide

Career Prep: Linux Interview Questions for UI/UX Design Professionals

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Write better qualitative usability tasks: top 10 mistakes to avoid.

April 9, 2017 2017-04-09

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Qualitative usability studies are dependent on a few key pieces: a design to test, a participant to test it, and (often) a moderator to run the session. The other essential element: the tasks.

A task needs to accurately and adequately reflect the researcher’s goal , as well as provide clear instructions about what participants need to do. Good tasks are essential to having a usability study that results in accurate and actionable findings .

Writing tasks for a usability test is not easy. As any experienced usability researcher can tell you, how the task is written directly impacts the success of the study . If you give study participants bad instructions, you can bias them and completely change the outcome of the study . At best, you won’t learn that much, and the study won’t reflect real-world use very well. At worst, your “findings” will be directly misleading and cause you to make the product worse, rather than better.

After you’ve written your tasks, take another pass through them, looking for common mistakes that can impact the value or depth of your findings, or the well-being of your participant.

In This Article:

1. telling users where to go, 2. telling users what to do, 3. creating out-of-date tasks, 4. making tasks too simple, 5. creating an elaborate scenario, 6. writing an ad, not a task, 7. risking an emotional reaction, 8. trying to be funny, 9. offending the participant, 10. asking rather than telling, tip: start with the end goal.

Do words from the interface appear in your task? If so, you’re priming your participants and testing their reading comprehension and ability to find matching words, rather than your labels and navigation. Rewrite the task to remove any words that appear in your interface, so you give yourself a fair chance to see if users can find their way around the site.

Task goal: Use the location finder tool (labeled Find a Branch )

Leading user task: Find a branch near you and see when it is open tomorrow.

Improvement: When is the bank location that’s most convenient to you open tomorrow?

As part of a task, users may need to go through several steps , such as registering for the site, installing software, or downloading a document. Take the opportunity to gather more about the process by not warning study participants about what they will need to do. When your task includes prompts to register, install, or download, you may miss out on the valuable feedback that users might offer when encountering that step in the process. For example, participants may be surprised or annoyed by an additional or unexpected step.

Task goal: Find the price for consulting services

Overly-structured task: Locate information about consulting services, provide details about yourself and your company, and set up a time to talk to a consultant about pricing.

Improvement: Find out how much a consulting project costs.

Often, we write tasks only a few days before the usability study is scheduled. Even so, consider the timeliness of your tasks. If your task includes a future event, make sure that event is going to still be in the future during testing. If the task is to find a flight leaving February 20, don’t run that test on February 22. A task about the latest news on a site should be updated the day before or the day of testing to include current content. Be cautious if tasks include information that is typically relevant or updated only in specific months or seasons. Users may think the site has out-of-date information or that the tasks aren’t realistic.

Task goal: Find sports teams’ scores (Assume testing is taking place in February. In the United States, baseball is played from April to October. Hockey is played October through April.)

Outdated task: Find out how the Cubs did in their last baseball game.

Improvement: Find out how the Blackhawks did in their last hockey game.

If you want to know if people can effectively use charts, graphs, or information on the site, don’t just test if they can navigate to it. Create tasks that make study participants work a bit for the information . Your goal isn’t to make tasks unnecessarily complex, but to give users a realistic task that requires processing, rather than just locating information.

Task goal: Find and use player statistics ( Points Per Game is the first item listed in player statistics, sorted from highest to lowest)

Too-easy task: Who scored the most points, averaged across games, in the league?

Improvement: Who scored more points, averaged across games, during the season: Russell Westbrook or LeBron James?

Some tasks may benefit from a small scenario to give the activity some context. A short description may help study participants understand the reason for such a task or clarify the exact information you would like them to find. You may suggest a genre of music that the participant should investigate, a reason for looking for particular information, or provide a name and address for a purchase. For instance, you may include a detail such as when a gift recipient’s birthday is, to see if users can find a shipping option that will ensure a gift is delivered on time.

Scenarios can be helpful, but be cautious when using them. They are not always necessary. They may add complexity to a task that could be straightforward . They can increase the number of details users must read through and remember . Sometimes such scenarios are used to justify an unusual or abnormal activity. If it takes a long story to explain why a user would want to do an activity, it’s likely not a realistic task to test.

Task goal: Find and use nutritional guidance information

Unnecessary backstory: You are helping babysit your friend’s 3-year-old boy for a week and want to know more about healthy diets for kids. Find out how much grain should be in his diet.

Improvement: Find out how much grain should be in a 3-year-old’s diet.

Don’t let marketing language or internal lingo sneak into tasks. Make sure your tasks don’t include marketing phrases like “exciting new feature,” business phrases like “thinking outside the box,” or mysterious corporate acronyms. Use user-centric language, not maker-centric language . For specialized audiences, it may make sense to use technical terms or audience-specific language, but that is the exception, rather than the rule.

Task goal: Use the new social sharing feature

Promotional wording: Check out the exciting new feature that lets you quickly and easily share articles with colleagues.

Improvement: Send an article to a colleague.

While writing a task that revolves around someone’s mother may seem harmless, you never know the specific circumstances of your study participants. Mentioning a specific relationship in a task may add unnecessary emotion to the user test. What if the participant has a difficult relationship with the person you’re referencing, or that person has passed away? Don’t risk upsetting a user and derailing a task or even an entire session. Part of the responsibility of running a usability test is to ensure the well-being of your participants. Stick to harmless and vague relationships instead – friend, colleague, a friend’s child.

Task Goal: See how participants shop for gifts.

Potentially upsetting task: Mother’s Day is coming up. Find a bouquet to send your mother.

Improvement: Send your friend flowers to celebrate her new job.

Don’t joke, use famous names in tasks, or otherwise try to lighten the mood. Doing so can backfire and make some participants feel awkward or, even worse, as though you are making fun of them. Even using gender-neutral names, such as telling the user to register as Kelly or Jesse, can be a distraction from the task.

Task Goal: Identify problems in the gift subscription checkout flow.

Distracting joke in task: Send a subscription to your friend for her birthday. Her name is Ima Customer and she lives at 826 Main Street in Tempe, Arizona, 85280.

Improvement: Send a subscription to your friend for her birthday. Her name is Jen Smith and she lives at 826 Main Street in Tempe, Arizona, 85280.

Avoid potentially offensive details in tasks. Societal issues, politics, health, religion, age, and money all have the possibility of offending a participant.

Task goal: Find and use information about exercise and calories.

Potentially offensive task: You need to lose a few pounds. See what types of exercise will help you lose the extra weight.

Improvement: See what types of exercise burn the most calories.

While you want to be polite to your participants, don’t overdo it. Don’t ask participants “how would you” complete a task — unless you want them to talk you through what they theoretically would do on a site, rather than doing it. The point of usability testing is to see what users do , not to hear what they would do.

Task goal: Find the symptoms of the flu

Instructing the user to talk instead of perform: How would you find the symptoms of the flu?

Improvement: Find out what the symptoms of the flu are.

Sometimes, with all the things you need to avoid in a task, it can feel like you’re writing a riddle that the participant needs to solve. It can be hard to avoid navigational labels, steps, stories, or marketing language in your tasks. This is why task writing is more of an art than a science.

If you find yourself struggling to write a task, consider the user’s end goal rather than the task’s end goal. Rather than focusing on the section or the feature you want to test, consider why people would use that section or feature. What would they ultimately try to accomplish?

To test your checkout process, give the user a task to buy something. To review your newsletter subscription process, ask the user to sign up to receive information via email. To see if a user can understand content, write a task with a question about the information contained in the content. Starting with the users’ end goal helps streamline task writing, and reviewing these common mistakes can finetune the tasks.

Learn more about task-writing in our Usability Testing course.

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Jul 9, 2019 • 13 minutes read

8 Tips for writing great usability tasks

Follow these eight tips to create better usability tasks.

Elena Luchita

Content Marketing Lead at Maze

Whether you're new to usability testing or want to improve your know-how, we want to share with you our best tips for creating usability tasks. Tasks are the backbone of usability testing. How you write and structure tasks in a usability test will impact the accuracy of your results.

Usability testing is one of the pillars of good user experiences—uncovering undetected issues, user needs, and pain points. You need to make sure your test is well-structured, and the tasks you write are readable and easy to understand. It's simple to collect skewed data that validates your hypotheses yet isn't representative of your users.

The goal of this article is to share with you what we learned about creating usability tasks. We've been sharing bits of advice in our help documentation and directly with you, but we wanted to bring all our learnings in one post.

In Maze , you build your test out of missions, so in this article, we'll also touch on tips for creating missions. But the advice is applicable no matter what you use to create tasks and test with users.

Pre-testing: Define user goals

Before you conduct usability testing, and preferably before you design anything—you should always start by understanding your users' goals. If you define user goals from the start, it will help you draft tasks for usability testing.

Define user goals before you start testing

The difference between user goals and user tasks is explained in this article by Paulo G. Latancia. He writes:

A goal is always an expectation for a final condition. The final condition usually has nothing to do with the use of the product itself, so it’s actually an outcome users wish to achieve by using the product as a tool.

Goals are independent of the tool or service someone uses to accomplish them.

Examples of user goals:

• Learn Y topic
• Get to destination X
• Sell my products

On the other hand, tasks are particular to a product or tool. They're explicit actions people take to accomplish their goals. In the same article, Paulo defines tasks as follows:

A task is a step taken by the user during the process of achieving a goal. In order to achieve a goal, users have to navigate through multiple steps completing small tasks. The information architecture of a digital product is formed by tasks.

Let's now roughly draft task examples for the first goal example we mentioned.

• Sign up for an online class.
• Attend online class.
• Get certification.

By the time you get to usability testing , you should have defined user goals based on the research you did. They will help you understand how your product helps users achieve their goals. With those goals in mind, you can start drafting the usability testing script and the tasks you need for the test.

Start with a simple task

We’ve shared this tip in our 7 tips to craft the best maze article, but it's worth repeating it here. For users to become accustomed to the testing experience and your product, start your test with one simple task.

Ask users to perform no more than two to three clicks in your first task. For instance, you can begin your test with a walk-through task for users to navigate your website or app.

This will "show users around" by providing context before diving into more complex tasks, and also familiarize them with the testing interface.

Give users one task at a time

Depending on the fidelity of your prototype, you might have many elements you want to test in a session. For example, in a high-fidelity prototype, the things you can test are plenty. Our advice is to give users one task at a time, testing each activity step by step.

💡 Tip! Your maze test is built out of missions, so we recommend you keep each mission focused on one task, i.e., one mission equals one task.

Avoid grouping tasks together—this will create lengthy and complicated instructions, and users will have to be reminded about what they have to do. Split tasks up to create the focus on a single 'to-do' activity for your users. By focusing on one task at a time, you'll avoid overwhelming your users.

Follow your design's flow

When a new user arrives on your website, they do certain actions first, e.g., sign up or log in. To create a realistic user test, follow the same flow users take in your live website or product.

Avoid starting your test with a task at the end of the user flow and then jumping to the start of the flow—this will only disorient users.

Follow the user flow when you create tasks

When you create missions in Maze, you’ll notice that each new mission starts with the last mission’s screen. That’s on purpose. By starting on the same screen users previously were, you’ll create a natural feel for users going through the test.

💡 Tip! You can change the start screen of a mission if you need to, but make sure the jump from screen to screen makes sense.

Make tasks actionable

The premise of usability testing is to learn if users can complete tasks using your product. For this, you have to create similar tasks to those users do in real life in your app or website.

One way to encourage users to interact with the design is to use action verbs in your tasks. Examples of action verbs specific to usability testing are create, sign up, complete, check out, buy, subscribe, download, invite, etc.

An example of an actionable task is: Create a new project in your dashboard.

Making your tasks actionable will encourage users to click or tap on your prototype, and this will help you gather the data you need to analyze usability: clicks, misclicks, time on screen, and more.

Set a scenario

When you create missions in Maze, you’re asked to set a title and a description. The title sets the task's purpose or what you want the user to accomplish, while the description is an explanation of the task, and includes all details you need users to know.

The description is the place you can tell the 'story' and set a scenario for the task. For example, imagine this as an example of a task: Purchase plane tickets. In the description, you can give details and set the scenario:

"Your annual summer holidays are coming up. You need to book tickets for your family. Check out tickets for Greece, and purchase return tickets for all three members of your family."

Such a description gives users the task (purchase plane tickets) while being clear on why they need to do it (holidays are coming up). This scenario also shares the details they need to know to be able to complete the task: number of people (three) and destination (Greece).

Avoid giving precise instructions

One of the most important rules for writing usability tasks is to avoid asking leading questions. Try to keep your usability testing questions open-ended and unbiased. If necessary, get a copywriter to review your questions and task prompts.

Words that can give away hints are click here, go to, or navigate to . Similarly, "How much did you enjoy this product?" is a leading question that biases the answer towards your expectation that the user 'liked' the product. Instead, ask a more open-ended question like "What did you think of this product?" to get honest replies. If you give away the answer, you'll be collecting skewed results that don't reveal if users struggle when using the product.

Testing should approximate real life as much as possible. When your design will be implemented live, actual users will have to learn how to use it without much instruction. That's the reason you're testing in the first place: to understand if your design is easy to learn and use.

Include up to eight tasks in a test

Last but not least, we recommend you create tests with up to eight tasks, especially if you plan to do remote unmoderated usability testing. Our internal data reveals that maze tests with more than eight tasks (missions) have a high drop-off rate. Longer tests take more time to complete and require more effort—so they are usually abandoned by some users.

Usability testing relies on user feedback and their willingness to offer you this feedback. It's our responsibility to create tests that don't take up big chunks of users' time.

TLDR: 8 quick tips for writing usability tasks

Making the tasks easy to read and act upon, and respecting users' availability are good practices to keep in mind if you want to get valuable and accurate results from usability testing.

• Define user goals. You should have a clear understanding of users' goals and how your product helps users achieve them. This will help you write tasks for usability testing when the time comes.
• Start with a simple task. Begin your test with one simple task to familiarize users with the product and the testing experience.
• Give users one task at a time. Avoid overwhelming users by giving them multiple tasks at once. Let them complete (or give up) each task before you present them with a new one.
• Follow your design's flow. Understand and apply your design's flow to the usability test to create a realistic scenario.
• Make tasks actionable. Use actionable verbs like download, buy, sign up in your tasks to encourage users to interact with the interface.
• Set a scenario. Set a scenario to help users understand why they're completing the tasks and give them all the details they need to know.
• Avoid giving precise instructions. Steer clear of words such as 'click on' or 'go to' to avoid leading your users towards the task answer.
• Include up to eight tasks in a test. When testing remotely, keep tests short by including up to eight tasks in one test.

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Conducting User Interviews, Usability Testing, and Surveys

When I began my career as a UX designer, many product developers shared the aspiration of building great products with numerous features. While building great products is a worthy goal, teams often paid little attention to users’ real needs when deciding what features to build, which is a great shame. App development is not just about creating a product but about solving a problem for users. As an essential part of human-centered design, user research helps us to crystallize users’ problems and create solutions that directly address them.

As a design lead, I make user research an integral part of my team’s design process. We use various approaches to interacting with users to help us tailor the end product to the audience’s needs. In this article, I’ll share some of my experiences conducting different types of user research, focusing mainly on in-depth user interviews, usability testing, and surveys, but we’ve used all of the approaches that Figure 1 depicts. You’ll learn how to use each of these types of user research and discover useful methods of collecting and analyzing users’ thoughts.

User Interviews

The user interview is a method of research that gives you deep insights into users’ needs, painpoints, and desires while also building empathy with them. Interviewing users requires a lot of attention to detail and well-developed interviewing skills. The following best practices will help you to conduct user interviews successfully:

• Warm up before each interview. The first seconds of an interview can be awkward, so your first goal is to become familiar with the participant and create a relaxed atmosphere. Set the context for the interview, describing its purpose and indicating its approximate duration. If you want to record the interview, this is the best time to ask for permission.
• Ask follow-up questions. Follow-up questions are those you didn’t plan. Ask them based on the information you’ve obtained during the interview. I love asking follow-up questions because this is where I find the most insights.
• Ask the same questions in different ways. Another way to follow up is to restate your initial question. I often do this to get at the root of a problem and determine the user’s actual opinion. Using synonyms, injecting a perspective, or pointing to the user’s past experiences can be really helpful here.
• Keep your script in mind, but be flexible. You might sound a bit like a robot if you follow your script strictly, and this is definitely not the way to build empathy. Plus, by sticking too closely to your script, you might miss out on insights and other valuable information. So keep your script close, but be ready to improvise.
• Create a safe environment for your participants. A user interview is most effective when it turns into a frank talk. If you create a nonjudgmental atmosphere and convey your trustworthiness, participants will feel comfortable sharing their opinions. So put the necessary effort into creating a safe environment.
• Wrap up in a friendly way. Your final words are important. It’s not enough to just say Thank you and leave. Use the time at the end of your interviews to communicate your appreciation of the participants’ time, let them know the following steps, and ask them whether you can contact them later, if necessary. You might also ask them for recommendations on who else would be interested in participating in an interview.

When to Conduct User Interviews

Key goals for conducting user interviews are as follows:

• discovery research —This research usually occurs during the first stage of product development, when no product yet exists. You might have a basic idea, but need to dig deeper into the market need and the problem you’re trying to solve. The goal of conducting user interviews during the Discovery stage is getting to know about your users’ experiences and how they currently solve their problems.
• gathering in-depth feedback about an existing product —Once you’ve released the product with all its features and user flows, it’s time to ask users for feedback. The goal here is to ask about their experience using the product and figure out what user needs and painpoints remain unsatisfied.

Asking Good Questions

During user interviews, it’s vital that you engage participants and get them to give you truthful answers to your questions. To ensure that I learn about real user needs, expectations, and thoughts, I ask only open-ended questions. If you ask open-ended questions, participants can’t just provide Yes or No users; they have to tell you a story. Plus, you can ask additional questions to clarify the information they’ve provided.

Good questions ask about the participant’s previous experience. Don’t ask participants to imagine a hypothetical situation. Instead, ask them to tell you about an actual situation in their life. Here are some examples of good questions:

• Tell me about how you started donating to charity projects.
• Why did you donate to charity projects?

Avoiding Bad Questions

Don’t ask participants questions about the future. If they haven’t experienced something in their real life, they’ll need to imagine the situation to answer the question. So what would you get in response? A fake, constructed answer.

Asking closed questions restricts a person to only two possible answers. As a consequence, instead of focusing on what matters to users, we simply confirm our assumptions. Here are some examples of bad questions:

• Will you be donating to charity projects?
• Why would you donate to charity projects: to make a social impact or clear your karma?

The Optimal Sample Size

When conducting user interviews, the optimal sample size is typically five participants. The more users you interview, the less new information you’ll learn. Additional users will just say the same things.

However, there is one case in which you need to interview additional users: when your product has several distinct user groups. But, in this case, you don’t need to interview five people in each group. If you have two user groups, interview three or four participants belonging to each group; if three or more user groups, three participants.

After gathering all our interview notes and converting recordings to text, I add all the data to a table. Then, our design team creates an affinity diagram—a visualization of the information that groups our notes by category. Based on the affinity diagram, we render the data as a value proposition canvas (VPC), as Figure 2 shows.

Usability Testing

Usability testing is an important part of the development process and provides user feedback on the usability of an existing product or a prototype of a new product. Usability testing lets UX designers look at a product from the user’s perspective, enabling them to create a customer journey map (CJM) similar to that shown in Figure 3.

There are two basic types of usability testing, as follows:

• moderated testing —This type of testing involves one participant, a facilitator, and ideally, someone who takes notes. The facilitator provides test tasks to a participant, observes how the participant interacts with the product or design prototype in real time, and asks follow-up questions.
• unmoderated testing —In this type of testing, the facilitator’s work is fully automated, so a session involves only a participant. During a test session, instructions, test tasks, and follow-up questions appear on the participant’s screen, so there’s no human impact on the process.

Moderated testing provides more flexibility and opportunities to interact with participants. You can warm up participants at the beginning of their test session, ask follow-up questions, get direct feedback from participants, and tell them they’re free to criticize the product. So you may gain valuable information that you’d miss if were conducting unmoderated testing.

When to Conduct Usability Testing

Key goals of conducting usability testing are as follows:

• testing user-interface design solutions when creating a new product
• improving the user-interface design for an existing product

Types of Test Tasks

For usability testing, the test tasks that you create must represent realistic activities that the participant would perform in real life. Test tasks might be either of the following types:

• open-ended tasks —The participant receives a task to perform without any guidance or tips on how to complete the task. The moderator only observes the participant and asks additional questions. Here is an example of such as task: Donate to a charity project.
• closed tasks —The participant receives a detailed task with the steps to take to complete the task. Usually, the goal of a closed task is to see how quickly a participant can complete the task. The moderator observes the participant and asks follow-up questions. Here is an example of such as task: Donate one dollar to the WWF via PayPal.

Asking Good Follow-up Questions

The follow-up questions that you ask participants can be very specific or open ended, depending on the type of research you’re conducting.

• Why did you do that?
• What do you understand about this screen?

During usability-test sessions, asking such follow-up questions gives you a better understanding of the participant’s intentions and thoughts.

Avoiding Bad Follow-up Questions

Avoid asking participants questions about the future because you’d be asking them to imagine a situation rather than share their actual experience. Here’s an example of such a question: Will you be using this filter function in searching for a charity to which to donate?

When conducting usability testing, the optimal sample size is typically five participants. Nielsen/Norman Group’s research indicates that testing with five users is sufficient to discover the most common problems that users encounter when using a product, even for a product with a large audience. So, for a typical qualitative usability study for a single user group, I recommend using five participants.

Your analysis starts with prioritizing the feedback you’ve gathered from participants. At Uptech, we use a feedback-prioritization framework. Each type of feedback gets the appropriate color, as shown in the legend in Figure 4.

Then we fix bugs, decide what changes to implement, and determine what to put in the backlog. We create a type of affinity diagram, an impact/value map similar to that shown in Figure 5, to determine what issues to focus on.

This step is pretty similar to that for user interview, with one difference: we create an affinity diagram for a specific feature or user-flow stage rather than for the whole product.

Getting conversational is good, but sometimes you need to find out how a large number of people feel about an application. After all, you’ll potentially release the application to an audience of millions. This is what surveys are for!

A survey is a quantitative user-research tool and often takes the form of a questionnaire. Surveys are an economical way of acquiring user feedback for app development. You can conduct a survey verbally, manually, or digitally, by asking candidates to answer a series of questions.

You must plan your questionnaire properly and make it easy to complete. If you ask clear questions that are essential to your research, you’ll receive meaningful answers. Start with simple, closed questions, then continue with open-ended questions to get in-depth answers. This approach helps keep participants engaged until the end of the survey.

When to Conduct Surveys

Key goals of conducting surveys are as follows:

• screening participants —Screeners helps ensure that you find the right research participants and filter out people who don’t belong to the target audience for the product.
• market research —Such questionnaires measure brand awareness, customers’ level of loyalty to your business, and customers’ ratings of your products and services. We’ve all received email messages that ask us to rate our satisfaction with a product or service. These surveys are very popular among marketers.

The following questions are from a user survey that we conducted at Uptech:

What smartphone do you use?

Did you make any charitable donations in the last 12 months?

How much did you donate in the last 12 months and to which events, charities, or causes?

For context, the first two questions are screening questions because we were interested only in iOS users who donate to charity projects. We placed the third, open-ended question at the end of the questionnaire. It was important to get the bigger picture on users’ charitable-giving habits and learn what social issues matter to them.

Always avoid repeating the numbers in ranges. In the responses to the following question, the same age is included in multiple age ranges, which is very confusing. What option would you choose if you were 20 years old: 10–20 or 20–30?

How old are you?

• 10–20
• 20–30
• 30–40

How would you respond if you came across the following confusing question?

How satisfied were you with the Search field in the charitable-giving app?

Provide a rating of from 1 to 7, as follows:

• 1—More dissatisfied than satisfied
• 4—Neutral
• 7—More satisfied than dissatisfied

What does it mean to be more dissatisfied than satisfied ? What if I am fully satisfied? Which answer should I choose? Simplify this question, as follows:

• 1—Very dissatisfied
• 2—Somewhat dissatisfied
• 3—Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
• 4—Somewhat satisfied
• 5—Very satisfied

Create simple, straightforward answers to your questions.

The Optimal Sample Size and Length

When conducting a survey, the optimal sample size is typically about twenty participants. Keep your online surveys short. Your goal is to maximize the response rate and, with a brief survey, you’re more likely to do that. My recommendation is that a survey should take no more than 10 minutes to complete.

Before conducting a survey, be sure to define a clear goal for the survey and outline your top research questions. Then, once your survey is complete, take a look at the results for your top research questions. Finally, analyze and compare your findings for specific user groups within your target audience. Let’s say you wanted to compare how people from the USA and Europe have answered the question about the amount of their donations. To figure this out, you need to filter and cross-tabulate the results.

It’s important to pay attention to the quality of your data and to understand statistical significance. Based on your data, you can draw conclusions about benchmarks and trends.

Tools for Conducting User Research

The best tool for user research is the one that suits you and your team. There’s no need to stick with one tool just because you’ve been using it for years or to choose one that has sophisticated capabilities. Find the balance between convenience, purpose, and functionality. At Uptech, we  use the following tools for specific purposes:

• Remote, moderated usability testing: Figma + Zoom/Google Meet
• Remote, unmoderated usability testing: User Testing
• Collaborative sessions and whiteboarding: FIGJAM, Miro
• Usability-test results: Notion, Google Sheets
• Surveys and screeners: Google Forms, Typeform

Final Words

User research is an integral part of the development process and helps ensure that you create a product that is better adapted to user needs. You can learn more about your users’ needs, behaviors, and painpoints by conducting user interviews, usability studies, or surveys.

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Design Team Lead at Uptech

Kyiv, Ukraine

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A Guide To Usability Testing Procedure And Creating Tasks For Successful Usability Testing

Simbar Dube

When it comes to qualitative research techniques used in Conversion Rate Optimization , there are quite a few that give a good amount of insights on user reactions and feedback. One such method is usability testing .

However, as Ayat stated in her article titled 9 Tips to Conducting Accurate Qualitative Research , “ qualitative research is only as good as the process and goals behind it .”

Coming up with the who, what, where, and how for the test is anything but simple. This might just be the reason why even the most experienced usability researchers often realize a mistake halfway through the test. 

Usability testing calls for proper research before the ultimate test. There is a great need to define the scope of your test, define the goals and design relevant tasks for the test. 

Goals are much more like the oxygen tank of any usability test, but it is the tasks that give direction and support. So understanding the usability goals is the first step towards coming up with effective tasks for the test. 

Having said that, this article will dig deeper into the usability tasks and the procedure of usability testing, in particular:

• Measuring usability tasks. 
• Types of usability tasks.   

What makes a good usability task?

• Steps involved in designing usability tasks.  

But before we delve into the heart of the matter, let’s start by defining tasks in the context of a usability test.

Usability tasks: defined 

Usability tasks can be simply referred to as assignments given to participants during a usability test. They can either be an action or activity you want your participants to indulge in during the test.  

I think of tasks as stepping stones that participants have to take in order to make progress towards accomplishing the goal of the usability test. A usability goal can be defined as the purpose of your test. The most common usability goals are as follows: 

• Effectiveness 
• Efficiency 
• Learnability 
• Memorability 
• Satisfaction

For usability tasks to be more understandable to your users, they have to be accompanied by scenarios —these are essentially stories that provide context and description that helps users interact with your product or service so as to complete the given tasks. Simply put, they help users perceive the purpose of the tasks they have to perform. 

Kim Goodwin gives an extremely good description of scenarios in user testing:

Scenarios are the engine we use to drive our designs. A scenario tells us WHY our users need our design, WHAT the users need the design to do, and HOW they need our design to do it.

Example :   

Scenario : You are supposed to board an international flight to London next week on Wednesday to visit a friend and you are planning to return on Sunday evening. To book a flight, you have to use a credit card.  

From the above scenario, the goal of the researcher may be to find out the severity of the errors that users make when trying to book a flight using a credit card as a means of payment. 

Drawing from the same scenario, the researcher may ask users to perform these tasks:  

• Step 1. Sign up/login on the website
• Step 2. Enter the destination 
• Step 3. Enter the date range
• Step 4. Make a booking 
• Step 5. Review your booking. 
• Step 6. Make a payment.    

As you can see from the above example, tasks are arranged in a sequence that spurs participants into making a booking using a credit card. No matter the type of a usability test , the results accuracy is impacted by the structure of tasks.   

Measuring tasks for a usability test   

Each usability task can be assessed for effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. Ayat published an article titled Usability Metrics: A Better Usability Approach , and gave out these six metrics used  in measuring a usability task: 

• Task success rate 
• Time-based efficiency  
• Error rate   

Overall relative efficiency 

• Post-task satisfaction
• Task level satisfaction

Task success rate

Being one of the most fundamental usability metrics , task success rate or completion rate refers to the percentage of tasks that users were able to successfully complete. This metric is measured at the end of the test. 

Every researcher’s aim is for the success rate to be 100%, as it is the bottom line of every usability test. So in every usability test, the higher the task success rate, the better. 

However, a study , based on an analysis of 1,100 tasks, showed that the average task success rate is 78%. In the same study, it was also concluded that the task success rate depends on the context in which the task is being evaluated.     

The task success rate is calculated using this simple formula: 

Image Source: Every Interaction 

As easy to understand and calculate as the task success rate is, but what if a user partially completes a task, how then do you classify that? Do you consider it as a success or a failure? 

This makes the scoring more subjective, what other evaluators may consider as success may be allotted as a failure to others. There is no right or wrong rule when it comes to this. 

Similarly, Jakob Nielsen , co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, says that although this depends on the magnitude of error, there is usually no firm rule when it comes to scoring the partial success.  

But to make it as accurate as possible, each task has to have precise details about how to score success and what determines partial and complete success. 

Time-based Efficiency  

This is the average time that participants take to successfully complete each task or the speed it takes to finish the task. 

Time on task is good for diagnosing usability problems —you can tell that a user is having difficulty in interacting with the interface by the amount of time they take on a task. To come up with time on a task, you can simply use this equation: 

Time on task = End time — Start time

Now that you know how to calculate the time on task, the complicated part is coming up with the time-based efficiency. The formula for calculating time-based efficiency may look intimidating but it is understandable once you insert numbers.   

N = Number of tasks 

R = Number of users

N ij = The result of task i by user j; if the user successfully completes the task, then Nij = 1, if not, then N ij = 0

T ij = The time spent by user j to complete task i. If the task is not successfully completed, then time is measured until the moment the user quits the task.  

This is the ratio of the time taken by users to successfully complete a task in relation to the total time taken by all other users. It can be calculated using this equation: 

This metric involves counting the number of errors made by participants when they were attempting to complete a given task. For many researchers, counting the number of errors that users make may be daunting, but this metric provides excellent information on how usable your system is.  

But to help you measure this metric and obtain valuable insights from this metric, this is what Ayat recommends in her article ; “ Set a short description where you give details about how to score those errors and the severity of certain of an error to show you how simple and intuitive your system is .”

Post Task Satisfaction

As soon as your participants finish performing a task (whether they complete them or not), they should be handed a questionnaire so as to measure how difficult the task was. This post-task questionnaire should have about 5 questions, and it should be given at the end of each task. 

Task level satisfaction 

At the end of the test session, you can hand a questionnaire to every participant just to get an overall impression of the level of satisfaction they got from using the product you are testing.  The type of questions you will ask participants hinges on the amount of data you want to collect, they can either be open, closed-ended questions or use both. 

Types of usability tasks

Usability tasks are either open-ended or closed-ended in nature. The decision on which type of task to use usually depends on the objectives of your test —once you have defined your test goals, then you can decide on the type of task to use. 

However, Khalid Saleh , the CEO of Invesp, suggests that for a usability test to be effective, there is a great need to find “ middle ground ” and make use of these two types of tasks in a single usability test. 

Whether its customer interviews, polls , usability tests, surveys , focus groups or any other qualitative research method we conduct, we often use open-ended and closed-ended questions in unison at Invesp. This always gives the best value and a natural rhythm to the flow of our research.

Open-ended Tasks

As the name suggests, open-ended tasks are more flexible, designed with a minimal explanation on how to complete the task. 

They encourage an infinite number of possible responses, and this means that your participants can give you answers they think are relevant. According to Susan Farell from Nielsen Norman Group , open-ended tasks invite participants to answer “ with sentences, lists, and stories, giving deeper and new insights .”

Scenario : You are a frequent moviegoer who wants to have text message updates about movie premieres so that you won’t have to search for them on a daily basis. 

Goal : the researcher may intend to see how satisfied are the users when they are using the product on the test. In this context, here are some of the open-ended tasks that researchers may ask users to perform: 

• Please spend 6 minutes interacting with the website as you’d normally do. 
• Use this mobile application for six minutes, and make sure you get notifications movie premier notifications sent to your phone inbox. 

Or let’s say you have just designed an e-commerce website and your goal is to find out if users can navigate through the site’s checkout flow without getting distracted by certain elements. As an open-ended task, you can have this: 

• You have been awarded a $90 gift card that can lapse in the next 10 minutes, use it before it expires. 

From the above examples, you can notice that the tasks are ongoing, they do not have a clear end-point. Individual participants will approach and complete them differently. Basically, one of the things that makes a task open-ended is its ability to achieve the same thing using various methods. 

When to use open-ended tasks 

Identifying Usability Bottlenecks : If you intend to find any elements that confuse your users as they interact with your site, giving them a license to roam around freely on your site will help you uncover some deflecting issues that you were oblivious to. 

Discovering New Areas of Interest : Encouraging unanticipated answers, through the use of open-ended tasks, can be valuable at times — users can give creative answers and in the process, you can discover something completely unique and unexpected. 

Deciding on products to prioritize : Sometimes usability tests can do more than fishing out a website/app’s usability issues. With the use of usability tasks, you can strategically use a usability test to figure out your users’ areas of value.  

Closed-ended tasks

Also referred to as a specific task, this kind of task is goal-oriented and based on the idea that there is one correct answer. Participants are guided with precise details, exact features to focus on and how they are supposed to interact with the interface. 

With specific tasks, your test focuses on the exact features you want to research on. They are wonderfully effective at making the whole session easy for participants even though they bias users into giving preconceived answers, Susan says. 

Scenario 1 : You have to transfer $2,000 from the bank to your friend’s account but your schedule for the day is tight. So instead of going to the bank, you have opted to make the transfer using your smartphone. Use XYZ as your account number and ABC as your credit card details. 

Goal : in this case, the researcher may seek to find out how efficient is it for users to make any bank transfers using their mobiles. 

• Click here to open the website.
• Enter your name and use your account number as your password. 
• Click on the ‘ make a transfer ’ section. 
• Enter the amount of money you intend to send. 
• Enter the details of the person you intend to send to. 
• Press the preview button then confirm. 

Or imagine you have just finished working on a new website and you’d want to validate the first impression that your website gives, and so you conduct a usability test to see what participants think about your web pages. Here’s a closed-ended task you might use: 

Task : Use this link to visit the website, view each and every web page and click on the CTA button on the Home Page. 

From the second example, the researcher specifically wants to observe what kind of experience do the users after using the site. Notice how the task instructs the participants on how to interact with the site.   

When to use closed-ended tasks? 

Testing Specific Elements : Suppose you just added a live chat feature on your website and you’d want to test for its usability. In this case, you can give your participants specific instructions on how to use the live chat feature and ask them for their experience after the test. 

Complicated Products : Not all web-products are easy to use at first glance. Some websites are weird and some are just non-traditional. Using closed-ended tasks in such instances will help advise your users on how to navigate through it. 

Optimizing Pages : If you know that, through Google Analytics , your website has a high bounce rate, you can use closed-ended tasks to watch them go through the site and afterward, you can ask them about the challenges they may have faced. This will help you fish out the conversion problems and help you understand why they are bouncing. 

Defining the goals of the test and moderating the test is the easy part of a usability test. The challenging part is to recruit participants and to come up with effective tasks that mimic a real customer journey as much as possible. This is how  Elena Luchita  says about usability tasks:

You need to make sure your test is well-structured, and the tasks you write are readable and easy to understand. It’s simple to collect skewed data that validates your hypotheses yet isn’t representative of your users.

It’s much easier to recruit wrong participants and to make mistakes when writing usability tasks , most researchers can testify to this. There is a lot of consideration to be done. The Nielsen Norman Group considers writing good tasks for a usability test as much of an art than it is science. 

So, regardless of the type of usability test, here are some of the universal characteristics that make a good usability task:

Use Actionable Verbs 

Use the user’s language, not the product’s .

• Simple and clear 

The task has to be realistic

• Short and precise
• Avoid giving clues 

Whether the task is open-ended or specific, it’s best to persuade your users to take action to perform it , rather than asking how they would do it. One way of doing this is by including action verbs in your tasks.  

Here is a list of action verbs that can be used in a usability test:

If they can be actionable tasks in user testing, then there can also be non-actionable tasks. The difference between the two is that actionable tasks prompt readers to do while non-actionable tasks encourage users to answer in words .  

To show you what I mean, let’s say you are conducting a usability test to see if users can find a verification code in a link that is in your email marketing message. 

An actionable task will look like this, open this email and find the verification code , whereas a non-actionable task can be crafted as:  how would you find the verification code in this email . 

Seeing participants figure out how to complete a task through their actions will allow you to observe their reactions, and it will give accurate insights on how users operate your product.  Besides, you are likely to get inaccurate data if you depend on your users’ self-reported data it’s better to watch them express their words in actions. 

Remember that usability testing is premised on the idea of observing what participants do, not what they say —so whenever you find your users answering your tasks in words, just know that your tasks are not actionable. 

When I was in my final year at college, I remember attempting to read a friend’s medical textbook, I couldn’t go beyond one page. I was frustrated by too much jargon clustering the book. The diction used in the book was meant for students studying medicine —for a journalism student, it wasn’t easy to perceive the intended meaning of some paragraphs.  

Here is what  Tim Rotolo,  a UX Architect at TryMyUI, says about language when writing a usability task:

The main thing to remember is that writing good  usability testing  tasks comes down to communication. Your tasks have to make sense to the average user. Common language that is accessible and easy to digest is superior to very technical, stiff writing. Don’t talk like a researcher; be clear and straightforward.

So, when it comes to writing usability tests, you don’t want your participants to ever wonder “what does this mean?” It is a fatal mistake to assume that participants will understand your industry terms. It’s best to make tasks that speak to your users and not at them. Any misunderstanding could lead to fabricated feedback. 

To show you what I mean, let’s say you intend to design a new interface for sharing articles and you conduct a usability test to find out which icon will be the easiest for your users to understand. A task with a user-centric language will look like this: 

Have a look at the options below. The icons allow you to share the entire article with people. Choose the options that seem like the most intuitive icon for that action?

Needless to say, the wording of your task will impact the test outcome. Either negatively or positively. When writing tasks, make use of words that resonates with your participants —as the saying goes, “ focus on the end user, and everything else will follow… ” 

Simple and clear  

Forget valuable feedback if your tasks are not simple and clear to the participants. If your tasks are not clear to your participants, the outcome of your test may carry no weight. As you design your usability tasks, consider clarity as an important element. 

In every detail of your task, you should be precise. As much as you may want to observe how the participant uses your product, your tasks should be detailed in a way that your users may understand.

A good usability task has to be simple to understand but not too simplistic. Researchers have to strike a balance between the two. Participants have to understand what they are supposed to do, but the task shouldn’t lead them to the answer straight away.

Make no mistake of leaving your participants wondering what the assignment is about. If possible, make sure that they understand the tasks at hand before they do anything. 

Making tasks realistic is one of the things that is often overlooked when writing tasks for a usability test, and to be honest, this is pretty ridiculous. For insights to be accurate, the environment has to be as natural as possible and this also implies that the tasks have to mimic a real-life scenario.    

For instance, if you coordinate a test with the goal of finding out how long will it take for your users to find a product on your e-commerce site, it’s important to make sure that the participants you recruit use online stores to purchase products.

Asking participants to do something they don’t usually do will cause them to fabricate the feedback. Your best bet in soliciting reliable feedback is to give your participants that sense of being in charge and owning the task.

Give no hints

Why conduct a usability test when you give clues on how to use the product on a test? Isn’t it best to watch them use a product in a way they deem fit? Giving clues or asking leading questions ruins the prime idea of the study and it prompts users into doing things the presumed way.    

For Example, Imagine you conduct a test with the intention of finding out if users can notice important elements on your website.  

In such a scenario, if your task tells your participants which elements to focus on, then it’s as good as controlling them. 

Poor task: Go to the website, log in and subscribe for the weekly newsletter. 

Good task: Identify information that you consider to be useful on the site .  

Although giving clues may rob us of the opportunity of understanding our users’ thought process, at times it’s not easy trying to replace the standard words which are used in the interface. So, to avoid confusing participants, at times it’s acceptable to bend the rules and use words on the interface.        

Be short and precise 

Jakob Nielsen’s seminal web usability study of 1997 concluded that 79% of test users always scan the pages and only 16% read word-by-word. This is a reality you should work with, instead of fighting it. 

How then do you work with it?  

Make your tasks brief and precise. Minimize the time that your participants need to read and understand them. Lengthy tasks don’t just take undue time to read and understand them, but they may influence the overall time that users take to complete a task. 

It’s best to provide participants with necessary details ONLY , anything outside the context of what you want to test is unnecessary and irrelevant. Strike a balance between keeping the task short and detailed. 

Okay, here is what I mean —The year is 2019, and Samsung has just released the Samsung Galaxy S10 and you are interested in it. Log in the website, select the phone and add it to the cart.  

5 Steps involved in designing usability tasks 

By now you probably know the relevance of tasks in a usability test. So to ensure that you know how to write effective tasks, let’s take a closer look at the steps involved in designing them. 

Step 1: Align your tasks to your goals 

By the time you decide to design usability tasks, we assume that you already know which area of your system you want to test, and what goals are you trying to accomplish. The essence of any usability test (whether qualitative or quantitative) is to turn your goals into usability tasks. 

For instance, if 60% of your users are exiting on the checkout page of your e-commerce website. Your goal for a usability test may be to find out why they are leaving on that page, right? So, your tasks should urge your participants to go through the checkout page. 

If your tasks are off-track, everything about your usability test can go wrong without you even realizing it. 

Step 2: The scenario has to be relatable  

One of the reasons why researchers make use of scenarios in user testing is so that the participants are in the right state of mind before they perform any given task. 

Presenting a scenario that participants do not relate to can confuse them and lead to misleading results. For your users to genuinely engage and interact with your interface, your scenario has to be something practical in their own world. 

You can tell the task scenario is unrealistic if users seem confused or ask for any kind of assistance on how to handle the task required of them. 

To make sure that your task scenarios are relatable, the participants you recruit should be knowledgeable about the elements you intend to test. For instance, if you are testing an e-commerce website you make your task scenario relatable by recruiting participants that are well-versed with online shopping.  

Step 3: Decide on the format of your tasks 

Aligning your tasks to your goals is vital, but selecting the right type of task is as crucial. Each usability test has its own subject matter, and as such, the approach in terms of the format of the task can never be one-size-fits-all.  

As mentioned earlier, the two formats of usability tasks are open-ended or specific. You need to decide on the type to use between the two. 

Step 4: Organize the tasks in order

One of the things you want to avoid during a usability test is to confuse your participants. Just like in any other field, a change in a sequence has an effect on the outcome. In usability testing, there is a high chance of acquiring distorted results if your tasks are not presented in a logical order. 

Tasks are usually presented in order if the format used to design them is a specific one. In such scenarios, participants are required to go from one step to the other. However, in open-ended tasks, it may not be necessary to articulate the tasks in order. 

Step 5: Evaluate the tasks

One of the reasons why expert researchers notice mistakes when they are midway through the test is because they are too reluctant to verify the tasks.

Evaluating your tasks is the final step that must be taken before the process of designing usability tasks is complete. Evaluating your tasks will help you determine whether or not your tasks adhere to your goals. 

Be open-minded during this stage, as there may be changes you could make on the tasks to improve the effectiveness of your usability test. 

That’s a wrap  

Your tasks can either make or break your task. It takes one wrong task to poison a well-strategized usability test. There is a great need to be prudent when designing effective task so as to avoid any bias creeping in. 

Every human is prone to mistakes, this is why it is highly recommended to evaluate your tasks before the actual user testing session.  

If your task scenarios resonate with your participants, then you have higher chances of obtaining valuable insights. 

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