After conducting your usability testing study, you’ll have tons of different data obtained from your respondents. It’s time to dive deep into the study analysis process using task replay by examining how users acted during the recorded tasks. This is where you’ll get the most insights. Let’s get right into it.
How to analyze the results of your usability testing?
1. Go back to your goals
First things first, remind yourself of your primary goals.
Why did you conduct a study in the first place? What did you expect to find out?
Now, prepare your workspace. Answering those questions, analyze your goals and define what you’ll be looking for in the results. Create categories based on the tasks you gave to the respondents. This will help to keep all your insights organized later. For example, your categories may be: checkout process, logging in, adding an item to cart or finding the contact information.
You can do that in the Excel sheet or on paper, just make sure to leave enough space for writing down your findings. Here’s an example of such table:
2. Replay the tasks
Now it’s time for the most important part – analyzing the task playbacks. Focus on the events that happened during the study and follow every user’s interaction.
Here are some questions to help you analyze the sessions:
- Did the user manage to complete your task?
- How did they go about it?
- What problems did they encounter on the way?
- Were there any elements the user found frustrating or unhelpful?
- Did users at any point of the session feel lost or confused?
Write down all of the problems and insights you noticed and sort them into your categories.
3. Prioritize the issues
You might’ve obtained a huge number of insights during your usability testing, but not all of them will be equally severe. Prioritize the most important issues and start your improvement journey from there. Ranking your usability problems as low, medium or high severity will help you find out which ones need to be solved right now and which ones can wait.
For example, if the contact information form prevented a significant part of your testers from completing the task, it’s likely a higher priority than one of the testers complaining about app’s communication style sounding too casual to their liking.
4. Analyze the data
Make use of all the additional data you obtained and get qualitative or quantitative insights, maybe even both. Analyze your questionnaires and users’ answers. See if they had anything to say about your product’s overall performance and design as well as its user-friendliness. This includes your pre- and post-study questionnaire, information about the users and any other insights you’ve gained.
You can also use usability testing metrics for data anaysis. Metrics such as system usability scale, time on tasks and error rate wll help uncover hidden issues and are a great tool for UX benchmarks and keeping track of usability improvements ove time. If you don’t know which metrics to use, check out our video. There, you can find an overview of the mot important usability metrics and how to calculate them.
Now that you have all the insights, organize them all in one place. Make it a document or a spreadsheet. Analyze some of the most common problems that your users have encountered, group the similar ones together and focus on what needs to be improved first.
A usability testing tool will also help you make sense of the quantitative insights on the user. For example, the success rate of your study or how much time on average it took users to complete your tasks.
