5 tips for running an effective usability test

There’s no doubt usability is a key element of all great user experiences, how do we apply and test usability principles for a website? This article looks at usability principles in web design, how to test it, practical tips for success and a look at our remote testing tool, Treejack.

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A definition of usability for websites 🧐📖

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Web usability is defined as the extent to which a website can be used to achieve a specific task or goal by a user. It refers to the quality of the user experience and can be broken down into five key usability principles:

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• Ease of use: How easy is the website to use? How easily are users able to complete their goals and tasks? How much effort is required from the user?
• Learnability: How easily are users able to complete their goals and tasks the first time they use the website?
• Efficiency: How quickly can users perform tasks while using your website?
• User satisfaction: How satisfied are users with the experience the website provides? Is the experience a pleasant one?
• Impact of errors: Are users making errors when using the website and if so, how serious are the consequences of those errors? Is the design forgiving enough make it easy for errors to be corrected?

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Why is web usability important? 👀

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Aside from the obvious desire to improve the experience for the people who use our websites, web usability is crucial to your website’s survival. If your website is difficult to use, people will simply go somewhere else. In the cases where users do not have the option to go somewhere else, for example government services, poor web usability can lead to serious issues. How do we know if our website is well-designed? We test it with users.

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Testing usability: What are the common methods? 🖊️📖✏️📚

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There are many ways to evaluate web usability and here are the common methods:

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• Moderated usability testing: Moderated usability testing refers to testing that is conducted in-person with a participant. You might do this in a specialised usability testing lab or perhaps in the user’s contextual environment such as their home or place of business. This method allows you to test just about anything from a low fidelity paper prototype all the way up to an interactive high fidelity prototype that closely resembles the end product.
• Moderated remote usability testing: Moderated remote usability testing is very similar to the previous method but with one key difference- the facilitator and the participant/s are not in the same location. The session is still a moderated two-way conversation just over skype or via a webinar platform instead of in person. This method is particularly useful if you are short on time or unable to travel to where your users are located, e.g. overseas.
• Unmoderated remote usability testing: As the name suggests, unmoderated remote usability testing is conducted without a facilitator present. This is usually done online and provides the flexibility for your participants to complete the activity at a time that suits them. There are several remote testing tools available ( including our suite of tools ) and once a study is launched these tools take care of themselves collating the results for you and surfacing key findings using powerful visual aids.
• Guerilla testing: Guerilla testing is a powerful, quick and low cost way of obtaining user feedback on the usability of your website. Usually conducted in public spaces with large amounts of foot traffic, guerilla testing gets its name from its ‘in the wild’ nature. It is a scaled back usability testing method that usually only involves a few minutes for each test but allows you to reach large amounts of people and has very few costs associated with it.
• Heuristic evaluation: A heuristic evaluation is conducted by usability experts to assess a website against recognized usability standards and rules of thumb (heuristics). This method evaluates usability without involving the user and works best when done in conjunction with other usability testing methods eg Moderated usability testing to ensure the voice of the user is heard during the design process.
• Tree testing: Also known as a reverse card sort, tree testing is used to evaluate the findability of information on a website. This method allows you to work backwards through your information architecture and test that thinking against real world scenarios with users.
• First click testing: Research has found that 87% of users who start out on the right path from the very first click will be able to successfully complete their task while less than half ( 46%) who start down the wrong path will succeed. First click testing is used to evaluate how well a website is supporting users and also provides insights into design elements that are being noticed and those that are being ignored.
• Hallway testing: Hallway testing is a usability testing method used to gain insights from anyone nearby who is unfamiliar with your project. These might be your friends, family or the people who work in another department down the hall from you. Similar to guerilla testing but less ‘wild’. This method works best at picking up issues early in the design process before moving on to testing a more refined product with your intended audience.

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Online usability testing tool: Tree testing 🌲🌳🌿

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Tree testing is a remote usability testing tool that uses tree testing to help you discover exactly where your users are getting lost in the structure of your website. Treejack uses a simplified text-based version of your website structure removing distractions such as navigation and visual design allowing you to test the design from its most basic level.

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Like any other tree test, it uses task based scenarios and includes the opportunity to ask participants pre and post study questions that can be used to gain further insights. Tree testing is a useful tool for testing those five key usability principles mentioned earlier with powerful inbuilt features that do most of the heavy lifting for you. Tree testing records and presents the following for each task:

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• complete details of the pathways followed by each participant
• the time taken to complete each task
• first click data
• the directness of each result
• visibility on when and where participants skipped a task

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Participant paths data in our tree testing tool 🛣️

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The level of detail recorded on the pathways followed by your participants makes it easy for you to determine the ease of use, learnability, efficiency and impact of errors of your website. The time taken to complete each task and the directness of each result also provide insights in relation to those four principles and user satisfaction can be measured through the results to your pre and post survey questions.

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The first click data brings in the added benefits of first click testing and knowing when and where your participants gave up and moved on can help you identify any issues.Another thing tree testing does well is the way it brings all data for each task together into one comprehensive overview that tells you everything you need to know at a glance. Tree testing's task overview- all the key information in one placeIn addition to this, tree testing also generates comprehensive pathway maps called pietrees.

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Each junction in the pathway is a piechart showing a statistical breakdown of participant activity at that point in the site structure including details about: how many were on the right track, how many were following the incorrect path and how many turned around and went back. These beautiful diagrams tell the story of your usability testing and are useful for communicating the results to your stakeholders.

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Usability testing tips 🪄

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Here are seven practical usability testing tips to get you started:

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• Test early and often: Usability testing isn’t something that only happens at the end of the project. Start your testing as soon as possible and iterate your design based on findings. There are so many different ways to test an idea with users and you have the flexibility to scale it back to suit your needs.
• Try testing with paper prototypes: Just like there are many usability testing methods, there are also several ways to present your designs to your participant during testing. Fully functioning high fidelity prototypes are amazing but they’re not always feasible (especially if you followed the previous tip of test early and often). Paper prototypes work well for usability testing because your participant can draw on them and their own ideas- they’re also more likely to feel comfortable providing feedback on work that is less resolved! You could also use paper prototypes to form the basis for collaborative design sessions with your users by showing them your idea and asking them to redesign or design the next page/screen.
• Run a benchmarking round of testing: Test the current state of the design to understand how your users feel about it. This is especially useful if you are planning to redesign an existing product or service and will save you time in the problem identification stages.
• Bring stakeholders and clients into the testing process: Hearing how a product or service is performing direct from a user can be quite a powerful experience for a stakeholder or client. If you are running your usability testing in a lab with an observation room, invite them to attend as observers and also include them in your post session debriefs. They’ll gain feedback straight from the source and you’ll gain an extra pair of eyes and ears in the observation room. If you’re not using a lab or doing a different type of testing, try to find ways to include them as observers in some way. Also, don’t forget to remind them that as observers they will need to stay silent for the entire session beyond introducing themselves so as not to influence the participant - unless you’ve allocated time for questions.
• Make the most of available resources: Given all the usability testing options out there, there’s really no excuse for not testing a design with users. Whether it’s time, money, human resources or all of the above making it difficult for you, there’s always something you can do. Think creatively about ways to engage users in the process and consider combining elements of different methods or scaling down to something like hallway testing or guerilla testing. It is far better to have a less than perfect testing method than to not test at all.
• Never analyse your findings alone: Always analyse your usability testing results as a team or with at least one other person. Making sense of the results can be quite a big task and it is easy to miss or forget key insights. Bring the team together and affinity diagram your observations and notes after each usability testing session to ensure everything is captured. You could also use Reframer to record your observations live during each session because it does most of the analysis work for you by surfacing common themes and patterns as they emerge. Your whole team can use it too saving you time.
• Engage your stakeholders by presenting your findings in creative ways: No one reads thirty page reports anymore. Help your stakeholders and clients feel engaged and included in the process by delivering the usability testing results in an easily digestible format that has a lasting impact. You might create an A4 size one page summary, or maybe an A0 size wall poster to tell everyone in the office the story of your usability testing or you could create a short video with snippets taken from your usability testing sessions (with participant permission of course) to communicate your findings. Remember you’re also providing an experience for your clients and stakeholders so make sure your results are as usable as what you just tested.

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Related reading 🎧💌📖

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• Usability testing with Optimal Workshop
• Usability Testing: Five types of usability tests
• Usability Heuristics: How to conduct a heuristic evaluation
• Interface Usability:User Interface Design Basics

When it comes to financial services, user experience goes way beyond just making things easy to use. It’s about creating a seamless journey and establishing trust at every touchpoint. Think about it: as we rely more and more on digital banking and financial apps in our everyday lives, we need to feel absolutely confident that our personal information is safe and that the companies managing our money actually know what they're doing. Without that trust foundation, even the most competitive brands will struggle with customer adoption.

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Why Trust Matters More Than Ever

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The stakes are uniquely high in financial UX. Unlike other digital products where a poor experience might result in minor frustration, financial applications handle our life savings, investment portfolios, and sensitive personal data. A single misstep in design can trigger alarm bells for users, potentially leading to lost customers.

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Using UX Research to Measure and Build Trust

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Building high trust experiences requires deep insights into user perceptions, behaviors, and pain points. The best UX platforms can help financial companies spot trust issues and test whether their solutions actually work.

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Identify Trust Issues with Tree Testing

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Tree testing helps financial institutions understand how easily users can find critical information and features:

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• Test information architecture to ensure security features and privacy information are easily discoverable
• Identify confusing terminology that may undermine user confidence
• Compare findability metrics for trust-related content across different user segments

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Optimize for Trustworthy First Impressions with First-Click Testing

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First-click testing helps identify where users naturally look for visual symbols and cues that are associated with security:

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• Test where users instinctively look for security indicators like references to security certifications
• Compare the effectiveness of different visual trust symbols (locks, shields, badges)
• Identify the optimal placement for security messaging across key screens

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Map User Journeys with Card Sorting

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Card sorting helps brands understand how users organize concepts. Reducing confusion, helps your financial brand appear more trustworthy, quickly:

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• Use open card sorts to understand how users naturally categorize security and privacy features
• Identify terminology that resonates with users' perceptions around security

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Qualitative Insights Through Targeted Questions

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Gathering qualitative data through strategically placed questions allows financial institutions to collect rich, timely insights about how much their customers trust their brand:

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• Ask open ended questions about trust concerns at key moments in the testing process
• Gather specific feedback on security terminology understanding and recognition
• Capture emotional responses to different trust indicators

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What Makes a Financial Brand Look Trustworthy?

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Visual Consistency and Professional Polish

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When someone opens your financial app or website, they're making snap judgments about whether they can trust you with their money. It happens in milliseconds, and a lot of that decision comes down to how polished and consistent everything looks.Clean, consistent design sends that signal of stability and attention to detail that people expect when money's involved.

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To achieve this, develop and rigorously apply a solid design system across all digital touchpoints including fonts, colors, button styles, and spacing, it all needs to be consistent across every page and interaction. Even small inconsistencies can make people subconsciously lose confidence.

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Making Security Visible

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Unlike walking into a bank where you can see the vault and security cameras, digital security happens behind the scenes. Users can't see all the protection you've built in unless you make a point of showing them.

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Highlighting your security measures in ways that feel reassuring rather than overwhelming gives people that same sense of "my money is safe here" that they'd get from seeing a bank's physical security.

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From a design perspective, apply this thinking to elements like:

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• Real time login notifications
• Transaction verification steps
• Clear encryption indicators
• Transparent data usage explanations
• Session timeout warnings

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You can test the success of these design elements through preference testing, where you can compare different approaches to security visualization to determine which elements most effectively communicate trust without creating anxiety.

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Making Complex Language Simple

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Financial terminology is naturally complex, but your interface content doesn't have to be. Clear, straightforward language builds trust so it’s important to develop a content strategy that:

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• Explains unavoidable complex terms contextually
• Replaces jargon with plain language
• Provides proactive guidance before errors occur
• Uses positive, confident messaging around security features

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You can test your language and navigation elements by using tree testing to evaluate user understanding of different terminology, measuring success rates for finding information using different labeling options.

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Create an Ongoing Trust Measurement Program

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A user research platform enables financial institutions to implement ongoing trust measurement across the product lifecycle:

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Establish Trust Benchmarks

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Use UX research tools to establish baseline metrics for measuring user trust:

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• Findability scores for security features
• User reported confidence ratings
• Success rates for security related tasks
• Terminology comprehension levels

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Validate Design Updates

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Before implementing changes to critical elements, use quick tests to validate designs:

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• Compare current vs. proposed designs with prototype testing
• Measure findability improvements with tree testing
• Evaluate usability through first-click testing

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Monitor Trust Metrics Over Time

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Create a dashboard of trust metrics that can be tracked regularly:

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• Task success rates for security related activities
• Time-to-completion for verification processes
• Confidence ratings at key security touchpoints

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Cross-Functional Collaboration to Improve Trust

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While UX designers can significantly impact brand credibility, remember that trust is earned across the entire customer experience:

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• Product teams ensure feature promises align with actual capabilities
• Security teams translate complex security measures into user-friendly experiences
• Marketing ensures brand promises align with the actual user experience
• ‍Customer service supports customers when trust issues arise

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Trust as a Competitive Advantage

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In an industry where products and services can often seem interchangeable to consumers, trust becomes a powerful differentiator. By placing trust at the center of your design philosophy and using comprehensive user research to measure and improve trust metrics, you're not just improving user experience, you're creating a foundation for lasting customer relationships in an industry where loyalty is increasingly rare.

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The most successful financial institutions of the future won't necessarily be those with the most features or the slickest interfaces, but those that have earned and maintained user trust through thoughtful UX design built on a foundation of deep user research and continuous improvement.

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Knowing and understanding why and how your users use your product can be invaluable for getting to the nitty gritty of usability. Where they get stuck and where they fly through. Delving deep with probing questions into motivation or skimming over looking for issues can equally be informative.

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Usability testing can be done in several ways, each way has its benefits. Put super simply, usability testing literally is testing how useable your product is for your users. If your product isn't useable users will not stick around or very often complete their task, let alone come back for more.

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What is usability testing? 🔦

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Usability testing is a research method used to evaluate how easy something is to use by testing it with representative users.

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These tests typically involve observing a participant as they work through a series of tasks involving the product being tested. Having conducted several usability tests, you can analyze your observations to identify the most common issues.

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We go into the three main methods of usability testing:

1. Moderated and unmoderated
2. Remote or in person
3. Explorative, assessment or comparative

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1. Moderated or unmoderated usability testing 👉👩🏻💻

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Moderated usability testing is done in-person or remotely by a researcher who introduces the test to participants, answers their queries, and asks follow-up questions. Often these tests are done in real time with participants and can involve other research stakeholders. Moderated testing usually produces more in-depth results thanks to the direct interaction between researchers and test participants. However, this can be expensive to organize and run.

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Top tip: Use moderated testing to investigate the reasoning behind user behavior.

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Unmoderated usability testing is done without direct supervision; likely participants are in their own homes and/or using their own devices to browse the website that is being tested. And often at their own pace.  The cost of unmoderated testing is lower, though participant answers can remain superficial and making follow-up questions can be difficult.

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Top tip: Use unmoderated testing to test a very specific question or observe and measure behavior patterns.

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2. Research or in-person usability testing 🕵

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Remote usability testing is done over the internet or by phone. Allowing the participants to have the time and space to work in their own environment and at their own pace. This however doesn’t give the researcher much in the way of contextual data because you’re unable to ask questions around intention or probe deeper if the participant makes a particular decision. Remote testing doesn’t go as deep into a participant’s reasoning, but it allows you to test large numbers of people in different geographical areas using fewer resources.

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Top tip: Use remote testing when a large group of participants are needed and the questions asked can be direct and unambiguous.

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In-person usability testing, as the name suggests, is done in the presence of a researcher. In-person testing does provide contextual data as researchers can observe and analyze body language and facial expressions. You’re also often able to converse with participants and find out more about why they do something. However, in-person testing can be expensive and time-consuming: you have to find a suitable space, block out a specific date, and recruit (and often pay) participants.

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Top tip: In-person testing gives researchers more time and insight into motivation for decisions.

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3. Explorative, Assessment or comparative testing 🔍

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These three usability testing methods generate different types of information:

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Explorative testing is open-ended. Participants are asked to brainstorm, give opinions, and express emotional impressions about ideas and concepts. The information is typically collected in the early stages of product development and helps researchers pinpoint gaps in the market, identify potential new features, and workshop new ideas.

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Assessment research is used to test a user's satisfaction with a product and how well they are able to use it. It's used to evaluate general functionality.

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Comparative research methods involve asking users to choose which of two solutions they prefer, and they may be used to compare a product with its competitors.

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Top tip: Depending on what research is being done, and how much qualitative or quantitative data is wanted.

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Which method is right for you? 🧐

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Whether the testing is done in-person, remote, moderated or unmoderated will depend on your purpose, what you want out of the testing, and to some extent your budget. 

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Depending on what you are testing, each of the usability testing methods we explored here can offer an answer. If you are at the development stage of a product it can be useful to conduct a usability test on the entire product. Checking the intuitive usability of your website, to ensure users can make the best decisions, quickly. Or adding, changing or upgrading a product can also be the moment to check on a specific question around usability. Planning and understanding your objectives are key to selecting the right usability testing option for your project.

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Let's take a look at a couple of examples of usability testing.

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1. Lab based, in-person moderated testing - mid-life website

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Imagine you have a website that sells sports equipment. Over time your site has become cluttered and disorganized, much like a bricks and mortar store may. You’ve noticed a drop in sales in certain areas. How do you find out what is going wrong or where users are getting lost? Having an in-person, lab (or other controlled environment), moderated usability test with users you can set tasks, watch (and record) what they do.

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The researcher can literally be standing or sitting next to the participant throughout, recording contextual information such as how they interacted with the mouse, laptop or even the seat. Watching for cues as to the comfort of the participant and asking questions about why they make decisions can provide richer insights. Maybe they wanted purple yoga pants, but couldn’t find the ‘yoga’ section which was listed under gym rather than a clothing section.

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Meaning you can look at how your stock is organised, or even investigate undertaking a card sort. This provides robust and fully rounded feedback on users behaviours, expectations and experiences. Providing data that can directly be turned into actionable directives when redeveloping the website. 

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2. Remote, moderated assessment testing - app product development

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You are looking at launching an app for parents to access for information and updates for the school. It’s still in development stage and at this point you want to know how easy the app is to use. Setting some very specific set tasks for participants to complete the app can be sent to them and they can be left to complete (or not). Providing feedback and comments around the usability.

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The next step may be to use first click testing to see how and where the interface is clicked and where participants may be spending time, or becoming lost. Whilst the feedback and data gathered from this testing can be light, it will be very direct to the questions asked. And will provide data to back up (or possibly not) what assumptions were made.

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3. Moderated, In-person, explorative testing - new product development

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You’re right at the start of the development process. The idea is new and fresh and the basics are being considered. What better way to get an understanding of what your users’ truly want than an explorative study.

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Open-ended questions with participants in a one-on-one environment (or possibly in groups) can provide rich data and insights for the development team. Imagine you have an exciting new promotional app that you are developing for a client. There are similar apps on the market but none as exciting as what your team has dreamt up. By putting it (and possibly the competitors) to participants they can give direct feedback on what they like, love and loathe.

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They can also help brainstorm ideas or better ways to make the app work, or improve the interface. All of this done, before there is money sunk in development.

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Wrap up 🌯

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Key objectives will dictate which usability testing method will deliver the answers to your questions.

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Whether it’s in-person, remote, moderated or comparative with a bit of planning you can gather data around your users very real experience of your product. Identify issues, successes and failures. Addressing your user experience with real data, and knowledge can but lead to a more intuitive product.