On the web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website’s information is hard to read or doesn’t answer users’ key questions, they leave. Note a pattern here? There’s no such thing as a user reading a website manual or otherwise spending much time trying to figure out an interface. There are plenty of other websites available; leaving is the first line of defence when users encounter a difficulty.

Usability testing is great for anyone involved in the design, development, or marketing of a website.

Usability testing can play a role in each stage of the development process. The resulting need for multiple studies is one reason for making individual studies fast and cheap. Here are the main stages where you could conduct testing:

1. Before starting the new design, test the old design to identify the good parts that you should keep or emphasize, and the bad parts that give users trouble.
2. Test your competitors’ designs to get cheap data on a range of alternative interfaces that have similar features to your own.
3. Conduct a True Intent study to see how users behave in their natural habitat.
4. Conduct information architecture testing to give you the insights you need to design or refine a great information architecture.
5. Make wireframe prototypes of one or more new design ideas and test them. The less time you invest in these design ideas the better, because you’ll need to change them all based on the test results.
6. Refine the design ideas that test best through multiple iterations, gradually moving from low-fidelity prototyping to high-fidelity representations. Test each iteration.
7. Conduct accessibility testing to ensure your website can be used by users with a range of assistive technologies, such as screen readers or speech recognition software.
8. Once you decide on and implement the final design, test it. Subtle usability problems always creep in during implementation.

Remote user testing means that you can test the usability of any website from any computer, with users anywhere in the world. Traditional lab-based testing requires a moderator, users and the website to be in the same room at the same time.

The difference between quantitative and qualitative research is often explained using contrasting terminology, like “hard vs. soft”, “numeric vs. non-numeric”, “statistics vs. insights”, “measure vs. explore”, “what vs. why”.

Broadly speaking, quantitative research can provide path and performance analyses by capturing the “what” of user behavior. It enables you to study your users’ experience by the numbers (e.g. how many people were able to buy a product successfully on my website?). In contrast, a goal of qualitative research is to gain valuable insight into the thought processes – the “why” – behind user’s actions.

Laboratory-based usability testing has been around for many years. The effectiveness of lab-based testing in uncovering usability problems with websites and applications is widely accepted. However, in recent years the influx of remote usability testing tools has started to change the way usability testing is conducted. One reason for this has been the cost associated with traditional lab-based testing, which can become very expensive. Other reasons have centered on the shortcomings of lab testing, in particular the limited number of participant commonly used.

Here are seven important things that you can do with remote user testing that you can’t do with lab based testing.

1. Test early, test often… affordably

Remote testing is much more cost effective than lab based testing, which means you can test at every stage of the development lifecycle, from wireframes to a live website. Or conduct benchmarking studies on a weekly or monthly basis to see how changes to your website affect usability. Lab-based testing can cost tens of thousands of dollars, which usually results in lab-based testing not being run very often by most companies. Remote testing tools usually cost just a few hundred dollars, making it easy to test on a much more frequent basis, thus creating the opportunity to run more regular studies.

2. True Intent Studies

True intent studies focus around a user’s real aim when using a website. What is their goal on your website, how do they go about it, and did they achieve their goal? These are the main objectives. True intent studies can only be run online because you must intercept users as they visit your website so you can observe their natural behaviour.

3. Get large numbers of “hard to get” users in their own environment

You can test hundreds of people simultaneously, in their natural environment. Whether you need a doctor or French speaker in China, online panels let you tap in to the thousands of unique demographics out there.

4. Get more in-house people involved

Remote usability testing is a great way of introducing usability testing into a company using limited resources and budget. Typically, most companies only involve a few people in lab-based usability studies. Remote online testing enables other parties to reap the benefits and even get involved. Quantitative metrics will show your IT guys why changes are needed to your website, and the finance guys will have the stats they need to understand why money needs to be spent. 

5. Get statistically significant data

Lab-based usability testing is all about identification of usability issues and qualitative reasoning, not about quantification. Due to the small number of participants in lab testing (usually 5-10) compared to the hundreds or even thousands in remote testing, one simply can’t generate the quantitative reports that high level company decision makers may want to see. However, with remote user testing you can quash any in-house differences of opinion by getting the hard facts about your website’s user experience.

6. Special technology

Some interfaces just don’t make any sense to test outside their intended usage environment. Maybe you are running a user test on Facebook. The test involves uploading personal work with personal email contacts, pictures, videos and more. For this, you need the users to have their own email contacts, photos, videos and more. Having them bring their laptop or media to a lab isn’t going to do the study justice. Remote testing would allow them to use their own equipment at their own place…saving time, money and improving the quality of the results.

Or, let’s say you’re testing a recipe website that guides users step-by-step through preparing a meal; it wouldn’t make much sense to take people out of their kitchen, where they’re unable to perform the task of interest. When this is the case, remote research is usually the most practical solution, unless the users also lack the necessary equipment. We also call this the participant’s “technological ecosystem” because it implies that their devices and computing environment have an impact on how they interact.

7. Online accessibility testing

Now, let’s say you’re still testing that recipe website, except this time you need to test it for accessibility. Meaning you need to determine if there are any barriers that might prevent people with unique physical or mental needs from using the step-by-step recipe website in their own homes. It would be virtually impossible to replicate the technology and assistive devices of users with special needs, so the best way to do this is online.

Generally, A/B testing is for testing a single page of a website or even a single element on a single page of a website. In contrast, user testing is designed to test entire website and the whole journey that a user takes to complete the goal they had when they first visited the website.