Usability laboratory: expert assessment of a mobile application for iOS. How the analysis was carried out
Bank Saint Petersburg has been cooperating with Ashmanov and Partners St. Petersburg since 2014. During our cooperation, we have observed positive dynamics in website promotion: the number of transitions from search engines increased by 2 times, visibility for thematic queries increased more than 4 times. The Ashmanov and Partners team demonstrated professionalism and responsibility in solving the assigned tasks! We are confident in further fruitful cooperation! We also express our gratitude to the leading manager Daria Ivanova for her punctuality, accuracy in work, proactive approach and personal interest in high results.
Open originalRybakov Alexander
Vice President, Director of the Digital Department of PJSC Bank Saint Petersburg
Cooperation with the company "Ashmanov and Partners" was necessary for further development website of the Kommersant Publishing House: comprehensive audit existing versions site, search weak points and developing recommendations for improving each version of the site. Among the possible contractors, Ashmanov and Partners had the most impressive experience in complex work on large Internet projects with a large audience.
The agency’s specialists conducted a search audit, usability audit, usability testing of website pages, competitor analysis and mobile version site. Based on the results of a comprehensive audit, a set of measures was developed; during the implementation process, employees continued to advise Kommersant Publishing House specialists on the necessary changes to the website.
We hope for further fruitful cooperation with the Ashmanov and Partners company.
We express special gratitude to manager Olga Sokolskaya for her attentive attitude to our wishes, professionalism, efficiency and understanding of the specifics of a large media project.
Open originalUrban Kirill
Director for Information and Digital Platforms at Kommersant JSC
Specialists from Ashmanov and Partners performed a detailed audit of the existing website, identified growth areas, and then carried out a large amount of work on its text optimization. In addition, they provided a large amount of recommendations on improving the technical component of sites, as well as improving ergonomics and increasing conversion on the site. After launching the site on new platform experts from Ashmanov and Partners helped improve its position.
During our cooperation, the increase in traffic from search engines to our website was about 300%. The number of queries in the top 10 search engines has increased manifold, including for high-frequency phrases.
Currently, specialists from Ashmanov and Partners continue to advise us on issues search engine promotion and assist in the implementation of the recommendations provided.
We thank the company “Ashmanov and Partners” for the quality work done and clear, transparent reporting.
Open originalRyzhkova Lyubov
Director of ecommerce and development digital technologies
We have been cooperating with Ashmanov and Partners since January 2016. The company's experts conducted a search audit of our website and developed recommendations for eliminating technical shortcomings on the site.
In addition, Ashmanov and Partners specialists conducted a competitive analysis and also developed prototypes and page layouts for the new website, taking into account modern requirements for usability and search engine promotion.
Currently, Ashmanov and Partners is carrying out the entire range of work on search engine promotion of our website. We recommend the company as a responsible contractor who systematically approaches problem solving, understands the specifics of the business and promptly responds to requests.
Open originalReznikov M.V.
Director of Public Relations and information policy POLIPLASTIC Group
After changing the design on the vedomosti.ru website, we wanted to: 1) find out what problems our readers encountered; 2) increase search traffic. We contacted Ashmanov and Partners for advice.
Ashmanov and Partners specialists conducted a search and usability audit of the new website and its mobile version, and then developed detailed recommendations to eliminate errors. In addition, they tested all aspects of operation mobile application our publication and developed separate recommendations for correcting errors and improving navigation and user convenience.
We are pleased with our cooperation with Ashmanov and Partners and recommend them as an attentive, efficient contractor. We especially thank manager Olga Sokolskaya, who clearly controlled the audit work and development of recommendations, and also promptly and thoroughly answered all our questions.
Open originalProzorov Gleb Borisovich
CEO JSC "Business News Media"
The SOYUZSPETSODEZHDA company expresses gratitude to all employees of Ashmanov and Partners LLC for their professional work.
The company's specialists regularly carry out a large range of activities to promote our website in search engines.
After three months of working together, our site gained a foothold in the first places for many of our key queries, the number of visitors from search engines increased and sales increased. The company's specialists conducted a full SEO audit of our website. Based on the results of the audit, they developed recommendations for improving the commercial component of the site, and also suggested processing options key page our online store. Home page of the site and forms feedback became clearer and more convenient, we began to better understand the objective competitiveness of our online store. In addition, we received valuable recommendations for improving order processing. Together with specialists from Ashmanov and Partners, we developed and began to implement a strategy regional promotion site.
Thanks to the work of specialists from Ashmanov and Partners LLC, we are making our website more convenient for our clients and this work continues.
Open originalGamsheev Yuri Viktorovich
General Director of Soyuzspetsodezhda-Center
I have been cooperating with Ashmanov and Partners for many years, working in various organizations. The company was one of the first to appear on the SEO market and over the years has established itself as a team of professionals whose services, of course, are not cheap, but they are worth it.
The responsibility of the company “Ashmanov and Partners” to its clients, the desire to improve ourselves and help us improve is captivating.
The last of the joint projects with the company “Ashmanov and Partners” is the launch of a website after a redesign. Very important point was that the development of the structure and design of the site went in parallel with the company’s specialists working out our actions in terms of optimization. This made it possible to minimize risks when launching a new website and maintain good positions.
I would especially like to note the work of our account manager, Pavel Denisov, who not only manages our project online, but is also always ready to offer new solutions to improve our work and help in their implementation.
The reputation of the Ashmanov and Partners company speaks for itself. And I can confidently recommend her as a reliable and noteworthy partner.
Open originalRazumova A.
Brand manager of Renamax LLC
In order to objectively assess the effectiveness of the ongoing work to promote our website, we ordered an SEO audit from the company Ashmanov and Partners.
The company’s specialists conducted a comprehensive study: they studied semantic core, compared the visibility of our site in search results with competitors, analyzed technical problems on the site, studied text optimization of pages in accordance with the promoted list of queries, and examined the link mass.
For each stage, experts from Ashmanov and Partners provided detailed, visual reports and developed recommendations. They assigned a priority to each problem that needed to be solved, and then proposed a general search engine promotion strategy. Having familiarized ourselves with the proposed strategy, we quickly figured out where to focus our further efforts first in order to get the greatest return on our investment.
We thank the specialists of the Ashmanov and Partners company for their professional and responsible approach to solving the problem.
Open original 
To attract interested users to the site, we chose the Ashmanov and Partners agency as a contractor, which offered optimal conditions and an integrated approach to promotion.
The specialists of Ashmanov and Partners professionally approached solving our problems: they carefully studied the specifics of our business, conducted a competitive study, performed a comprehensive audit of our website, and eliminated technical errors, developed and implemented a promotion strategy that has already proven its effectiveness.
Cooperation with Ashmanov and Partners allowed us to attract three times more targeted visitors from search engines to the site. At the same time, the site no longer has the seasonal drop in traffic that is typical in our industry. We would especially like to note the regular detailed reports, clearly showing the results of the actions taken.
We plan to continue working together with Ashmanov and Partners and recommend this agency as a professional, executive contractor who is attentive to the wishes of clients.
Open originalVorobyov Valery Anatolievich
CEO
CHOUDO "School" in English"Es" expresses gratitude to the company "Ashmanov and Partners" LLC for the fruitful cooperation: operational work on our projects and demonstrated patience and understanding to all the customer’s wishes. We believe in maintaining existing business and friendly relations, and hope for further mutually beneficial cooperation in the future.
During our work, our website has significantly improved its position and become significantly more attractive in terms of usability.
I would especially like to highlight Roman Cherednik and Maria Zhebeleva as very attentive and responsible employees of the company.
We wish your company successful development and achievement of new heights in business. In turn, we recommend Ashmanov and Partners LLC as a conscientious and high-quality contractor to our partners.
Open originalPevunova A.V.
Marketing Director, “Yes English Language School”
With a pleasant, in your opinion, design, convenient functionality, useful options, released a product release, but... Despite powerful marketing support, users began to leave for competitors.
What's the matter? There may be several reasons. One of the most likely ones is problems with the usability of your mobile application. Competent usability testing will help you avoid such a situation and eliminate all shortcomings in advance. The procedure for this is as follows.
Step 1. Installation of the analytics system in the mobile application
When developing a mobile application, you should immediately integrate into it: Yandex.Metrica, Google.Analytics, Flurry, Mixpanel. After some time, say, in a month, the service will provide information about who, and most importantly, how they use the mobile application.
For example, Flurry parses:
- number and basic characteristics of users (gender, age, geography of application use)
- application launch frequency
- number and length of sessions
- navigation and events within the application (transitions between screens)
- malfunctions
All this data will help you understand what trajectories users follow within the application, which screens they most often leave, and what this may be related to.
Let's say that in most cases the user exits the application at the stage of filling the cart. What could be the reasons?
- The visitor cannot figure out how to fill out the main fields in the Cart.
- Doesn't see some of the items in the cart and doesn't understand whether they have been added or not.
- It is not obvious to the user whether the payment went through or whether any difficulties arose.
To test application abandonment hypotheses, you need to test the usability of the application on various characters and scenarios.
Step 2. Creating personas and scenarios for working in the mobile application
Characters and scenarios are a good tool for description target audience applications.
A character is, on the one hand, a kind of abstraction, a simulated representative of a segment of the audience, and on the other, a very specific person with his own behavioral characteristics, habits, and needs. Based on them, a user interaction scenario with the application is built.
In the case of an online shopping application, the scenario might look something like this:
- launching the application
- input search query
- choosing an interesting option in search results
- study of characteristics
- studying reviews
- order
- receiving notifications about delivery times
After installing the analytics system, creating characters and scenarios for using the mobile application, it’s time to move on to...
Step 3. Usability testing itself
For a usability test of a mobile application, you need to find several people who best match the description of the characters, create a list of tasks for them so that the respondents go through the necessary scenarios in the application. If the application allows for the purchase of goods or services, you must provide users with a bank card.
During testing, respondents should be given specific goals and observed exactly how they will be implemented.
Usability evaluation sheets should note:
- whether the goal was achieved in the mobile application
- what difficulties arose during testing
- how much time the user had to spend to achieve the goal
Step 4. Analysis of the received data
After testing, you should study the evaluation sheets and analyze at what stages of work in the mobile application difficulties arise.
One of possible reasons- errors in . An overloaded interface, complex and incomprehensible navigation, a multi-stage registration system - all this will confuse the user and prevent him from performing targeted actions in the application.
Step 5. Conclusions and troubleshooting
Making a list critical errors, you need to improve the usability of the mobile application, and then conduct a control test to make sure that the application has become much better.
Usability testing of a mobile application is an important part of its success among the target audience. It is recommended to conduct a usability audit both at the prototype stage and after the release of the mobile application. And then a couple of times a year - to eliminate errors in a timely manner and, of course, to stay in the trend of mobile development.
To find out how convenient a website or other software product is for users, you need to ask them themselves. But it is believed that testing on “living people” takes a lot of effort and time from the developer and/or owner of the resource.
For this case there are online tool s for usability testing. They help to find out how well the product meets user expectations, and at the same time, save time and money on research.
This article provides an overview of ten simple and available tools for usability testing of websites. What’s nice is that all of the applications described, with the exception of the last one, can be used for free: they do not require payment at all or have free versions with limited functionality.
First there is a description of all ten applications, and then comparison table, which reflects their main characteristics.
UsabilityHub
There are three online tools available on the site that allow you to test the usability of a site or web application using screenshots of pages.Optimal Workshop
On the OptimalWorkshop website you can optimize your site using three different tools:
- Optimalsort is a tool that helps you organize your website structure using the card sorting method.
- Treejack - multi-level testing application information architecture(IA) site. To start testing, the website structure needs to be organized as a table and loaded into Treejack.
- Calkmark is designed for testing the usability of web pages. It helps you understand how easy (or difficult) it is for site users to find necessary information. To get started, we upload a screenshot of the web page and set some task for users. Calkmark aggregates responses and displays test results as a heatmap of clicks, and also reports the average time it takes to complete each task.
IN free version You can only create small projects, with the following restrictions:
- OptimalSort: ten participants and 30 cards per survey.
- Chalkmark and Treejack: 10 participants and 3 survey tasks per survey.
This free online tool can be integrated into your website. It creates a short survey for site visitors, consisting of only 4 questions. The questions are formulated in such a way as to elicit the most reliable feedback from users.
Integrates with Google Analytics and is available in 10 languages, although Russian, unfortunately, is not among them yet.
Feng-GUI
Feng-GUI simulates the user's gaze during the first 5 seconds of exposure visual effect. This app creates a heatmap of the eyes on the page based on an algorithm that predicts what a real person is likely to look at.Right on home page site, you can upload a screenshot and see the likely areas of increased visitor attention.
ClickHeat
This is free software with open source integrates into the website and creates a visual heat map of clicks of web page visitors. And since the ClickHeat code is located directly on the server, the map reflects the results of the work of real site users.
WebVisor
A Russian system that, after installing javasript code on site pages, allows you to track and analyze user behavior.With its help you can:
- Record the actions of site visitors: clicks, scrolling, keystrokes, filling out forms, highlighting and copying text.
- Play back recorded actions in live video mode.
- Conduct detailed analytics of the behavior of website visitors.
- Create user activity maps: heat maps of clicks, attention maps and scroll maps.
SitePolice
Another Russian-language online tool for website usability testing. It allows site owners to test their resource with the help of auditors, and auditors to earn money with their labor.How it works?
- The customer submits his website to the “police officers”, formulates several questions to which he would like answers and chooses tariff plan audit.
- Auditors write a report on the site in almost free form. The report has only two required sections: “analysis of site usability and ways to solve problems” and “general conclusion.” For their reports and activity on the site, “police officers” receive points, which they can then turn into money.
- If the audit customer does not mind, then all “police officers” reports remain on the service website for general viewing.
Comparison table of usability testing tools
| Name | Russian language | Who tests | Test objects | Test results | Availabilityfreeversions |
| UsabilityHub | Eat | Service testers; other UsabilityHub users | Web page screenshot | Answers to questions formulated at the beginning of the test; heat map clicks | Free with restrictions - users of the free version must test other people's sites themselves |
| UserPlus | Eat | On your own using a questionnaire; service testers (in beta version) | Web page screenshot | Assessing the page for compliance with international standards | Free with a limit of one screenshot per month |
Conducting usability testing is one of the stages of development of any software. This service is provided by A1QA, which has been working in the field of software quality testing for more than 14 years. Over the years, the company has been able to become one of the industry leaders, largely thanks to the constant improvement of the qualifications of its employees. The fact is that QA belongs to the type of field of activity where even a short downtime threatens a complete loss of qualifications, since current trends quickly replace each other. Now the company has 8 competence centers, offices in Russia, Belarus, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA, and 500 quality engineers on staff. A1QA also has its own Academy - a place where both professionals in the testing industry and beginners can learn something new and improve their skills.
What is meant by usability?
In general, usability is ease of use. This term is also used in microeconomics, denoting the characteristic of the convenience of a particular item. In IT, usability means the convenience of a program, website, or application for the user. It helps answer several questions at once:
● Does the interface fulfill its intended purpose? Does it attract attention, does it make you want to continue learning the software, is it easy to find function buttons and links?
● Which interface elements are more noticeable than others? Usability testing helps to find out whether something is “eye-catching” important buttons, icons.
What aspects of usability are important to the user?
When entering a website or launching an application, the user expects ease of navigation. Feedback performance is also important: how quickly does support respond to questions in the chat window? Is it possible to write a letter and attach screenshots to it? When the support operator is not working, is there alternative way report a problem?
It will also be necessary to determine how long it takes for the user to fully adapt to the features of the application, and compare real routes of transition from page to page with conversion routes, that is, profit-generating routes.
What methods are used when testing in A1QA?
In order not to miss a single detail (which in the future can have a strong impact on usability), the company practices a dual approach to testing.
First of all, during usability testing, an expert analysis is carried out. Experts analyze use cases software product, testing different interface prototypes to choose from optimal option, systematize the identified problems and analyze their causes.
In addition to experts, specially created focus groups are involved in testing. The task of members of such groups is to use the software, and all errors identified during this are recorded and checked by specialists. Due to the fact that the involved testers are not familiar with the system, they are able to point out intuitively incomprehensible options and places in the program, which will then be corrected.
What will the testing done by specialists give?
A competent approach to testing all aspects of software quality, including its usability, can significantly improve the operation of an application, website, or corporate IT system. As a result, user satisfaction with the product they receive increases, which also affects the commercial success of the development. By increasing user loyalty, you work for the future: knowing that one of your works is highly rated, they will be more willing to purchase or download your other software products.
At A1QA, usability testing is handled by a separate competency center. Experts with IBUQ certificates work on projects, which already guarantees high quality execution of all stages of work.
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Living in an era Big Data, Internet of Things and smartphones, we regularly install new applications that ask for our personal data and location, asking for consent to track our online behavior. Obviously, behind all these requests is the desire of product owners to collect as much data as possible about users, optimize their own product and increase conversion.
However, recent research suggests that users are not very willing to share their personal data. Thus, according to the 2016 Global Consumer Trust Report, the number of users who easily share their data with the application decreased from 21% in 2013 to 15% in 2015. The number of those who are forced to share data in order to continue using the application has grown to 41% (compared to 33% in 2014).
And if for some applications a request to perform certain actions is an optional option, then others simply will not be able to work unless they receive user consent. For example, if the operation of an application directly depends on the user’s location, then refusing to provide geolocation data will reduce the raison d’être of the product to zero.
Can a mobile application tester make a difference and increase the user's level of trust in the application? Of course it can! If this is a specialist in usability testing.
It is worth remembering that design plays a very important role. How easier for the user will interact with the product, the faster he will gain trust and share the desired data.
In this article, we have collected some tips from a1qa experts on conducting competent usability testing:
Check how the app requests permissions
One of the points worth paying attention to is user interface, or rather, dialog boxes. Notice how the app asks the user for permission.
There are many ways to ask users for their data: implement the option to log into the application through an account social networks(accordingly, all account information will become available to the application), offer bonuses for performing a certain action, and so on.
Regardless of what strategy the developers used, one condition must be met: the user must clearly understand why this is needed and what he will get in return. While installing an application or responding to additional questions, the user should have no doubts.
Some applications ask the user an endless number of questions. Our advice: don't ask for permission until you really need it. If it is not possible to limit the number of questions, then good decision may be the development of a new window with a progress indicator.
Pay attention to whether the interface is overloaded
The application should not burden the user unnecessary information. Follow simple rule: one window - one action. It is better to have many clear windows than one filled to capacity. If this rule is violated, you have every reason to indicate this in the test report.
Provide intuitive navigation
Navigating the app should be easy. The symbols used should not be questionable or require explanation. Moreover, each navigation element should lead to the expected result. Besides, good navigation should inform the user about his current location in the application. The absence of such an indication is perhaps one of the most common errors that occur in many applications.
Check the readability of the text
Will the user be able to understand the text in the application while outdoors? What about indoors? Also, please note colour contrast between elements so that visually impaired users can work with the application under test.
Don't stop testing the product
It often happens that a mobile application looks good on a desktop PC, but is no good on a mobile device.
Or the product was well developed, but was not tested for real users and the defects appeared later.
To avoid such scenarios, it should be carried out on real users and on real devices. Basic checks can be carried out on your own, but for full testing For ease of use of the application, it is better to contact a professional team.