Usability is the ease with which a product can be used by people. For a software product: smooth navigation through User Interfaces (UI), ease of workflow and design of the product gives the best satisfaction to the target audience.
Usability testing is evaluating product from the users' perspective. The task is to identify the problems in the User Interface and workflow (of the product), which makes users' job difficult while working on the product. If a user faces difficulty while performing a task, it means the usability has some issues that need to be fixed. These issues occur because the developers and designers of the product have limited understanding of the end user's perspective. In product companies, there is a separate usability team that takes care of the ease of usage of the product for the desired end user.
The Challenge
If we follow the classical models of software development we may find it difficult to address usability issues, because we perform system testing -- including usability testing -- towards the end of the cycle. If the usability issues are identified at later stage, fixing them may require revamping the entire architecture of the product.
The Solution
The usability testing, inherently, should go throughout the life cycle of the product development. Usability tests can be formative, exploratory or early prototype. These provide best result when the tests are done incrementally, rather than after completion of the entire product.
Agile methodology is applied when a product development requirements change frequently and, the shippable product needs to go to the market regularly and rapidly. The UI of the product needs to evolve incrementally to provide the best user experience. Agile incorporates any requirements changes or fixing issues iterationwise – one after another.
Early usability tests are by and large qualitative. The attempt is to understand the branding impact of the product design, overall system design, content organization and high level navigational structure. At the later stage, the users’ behaviours are measured against established standards, more complex scenarios are tested and overall completion tasks are evaluated.
The Conclusion
The idea behind proposing this solution is to let you become sensitive towards the incremental efforts required for usability design, development and testing. Agile has the virtues to incorporate frequent changes in usability and test them.
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