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Morae Usability Testing

Morae Usability Resources

Introduction
Testing
Tools
Resources

Usability and User Testing

What is Usability?

“Usability is an approach to product development that incorporates direct user feedback throughout the development cycle in order to reduce costs and create products and tools that meet user needs.”

-UPA (The Usability Professionals' Association)

Usability is the degree to which an actual customer can use a product or service—such as a Web site, software application, or online store—to perform a typical task or achieve a particular goal.

What is Usability Testing?

Usability testing measures usability by giving you a close-up look at an individual customer’s experience while navigating a site or software application, right down to the customer’s verbal and facial expressions.

Why is User Experience Research Important?

The results from usability testing help you identify critical areas of a Web site, intranet site, or software application that need redesign. Improving the usability of software, Web sites, intranets and eBusiness applications has proven to increase customer satisfaction and retention while decreasing development and support costs.

Benefits of Usability Testing

Increase

Sales
Ease of use and productivity
Customer satisfaction and loyalty
Conversion rates

Decreases

Human error
Development time and costs
Training and support time and costs

Return on Investment for Usability*

Metric	Average Improvement
Sales/Conversion Rate	100%
Traffic/Visitor Count	150%
User Performance/Productivity	161%
Use of Specific (Target) Features	202%

* Alertbox, January 2003

Organizations typically realize a 10-to-100-fold return on their investment by incorporating user experience research methods into the development cycle and making design improvements based on that research.

More Information:

Usability PowerPoint Presentation

Need help convincing others of the value and importance of usability? Download our Usability PowerPoint Presentation to help you make the case.

PowerPoint 2003 Presentation »

PowerPoint 2007 Presentation »

Making a Business Case For Usability

In this guest article, Deborah Mayhew, a usability engineering consultant since 1986, gives ideas for preparing a cost-justification analysis and follows that up with four stories illustrating the impact of usability testing on the bottom line.

Read Article»

Download PDF»

When is Usability Testing Appropriate?

A product doesn’t need to be finished before you can conduct user testing. There are various stages of product definition/development during which testing can be effective.

The earlier in the process you conduct user research, the less costly it is to make changes, and the greater your ROI.

However, doing some testing any time is better than not doing it at all. Even if you aren’t early in the development process, you will still gain critical insights from testing that can be incorporated into the next release. With Web sites, you can easily make changes any time.

How Morae Fits Anywhere in the Design Process

Morae can be effectively used to test a product during any stage of development, from user needs assessment to release-ready build:

Design Process

TechSmith’s Tools for User Experience Testing

TechSmith has two solutions that make it easy and affordable to get started with user testing.

Interact

Web-based

Remote

Collaboration tool

Interact, Analyze, Share

Software-based

Fully-featured lab capabilities

Presentation focused

UserVue and Morae are separate programs, but work great together to help you analyze user behavior in labs and remotely - giving you a complete user experience. Learn how »