Here are 5 tips to ensure that your usability test is credible

Carrying out a usability test is part of a significant effort that is aimed at improving products profitability, whether you are conducting an early stage usability test or a validation for a live website design, there are so many ways of ensuring that your usability test is credible. Here are five tips to ensure that your usability test is credible, these tips will help you avoid overstating your findings. Count the number of users that experienced a specific problem: Although usability tests are about discovering and fixing a usability problem, however, making that problem list more specific can help you estimate the impact and prioritize for future comparison. For instance, when carrying out your analyses, you can state the problem and write the total number of users that experienced the same problem. (E.g. 3 out of 5 people experienced this problem) Estimate the impact of the problem using confidence intervals: Knowing the number of users that experienced a problem will help you estimate the effect. However, confidence intervals will help to provide you with the best estimate of users that experienced the same problem. This data is very important especially when you need to discover areas to focus more on during the product development. State the severity of the problem: Remember that not all website usability problems are the same therefore you must assume the frequency and severity are independent. Some design problems can lead to crashes, data loss or nucleus meltdown. Therefore you need to rate your severity from a scale of one to 3 in order to differentiate the many critical problems from the few that are less critical. Use completion rates: A completion rate is a significant and simple fundamental usability metric that makes it easy to collect data; they can be used to justify why some issues are legitimate and not false alarms. Use your past data for comparison: It is essential to keep track of your past data and uses them for comparison. This will help you detect the following;  If the number of usability problems is high or low  How the early efforts are in design are paying offrn The typical number of sever problems detected in early design versus late design Finally, keeping track of your data provides great benchmarks and can be an excellent source for ROI. Remember that the overall goal of usability testing is to inform design by obtaining the right data in order to identify and fix usability deficiencies existing in products, application or website. Read more tips to improve your Usability Testing on userfeel.com