User Testing vs Usability Testing: Key Differences You Need to Know
User research is an important step in understanding your users and creating better products. Two common methods used often are user tests and usability tests. While they may sound similar, these methods each serve distinct purposes and require different techniques. In this blog post, we’ll do a detailed comparison of user testing vs usability testing, explain when to use each, and provide actionable tips for conducting both effectively. By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding of how these tools can help you gain valuable insights and improve your product.
What are User Tests?
User testing involves inviting users to interact with your product to understand their behaviors and thoughts as they are using your product. User testing aims to evaluate the necessity of a product or feature by assessing target audience interactions and sentiments. User tests are crucial during the design process because of the following key reasons:
- Validating Assumptions: User testing allows you to assess the assumptions and design choices made during product development, ensuring they align with users’ expectations and effectively meet their needs.
- Understanding Your Users: User tests can help you connect with your target audience, uncovering their behaviors, pain points, needs, and expectations while fostering empathy for their experiences.
- Uncovering Hidden Issues: User testing reveals how users think and behave when interacting with your product, highlighting areas of confusion or frustration and uncovering UX issues that might otherwise go unnoticed.
- Inspiring Improvements: Helps engaging with users and collecting feedback so that you can get new ideas for enhancements, enabling you to continue to improve your product.
Please also note that user acceptance testing (UAT) is different from user testing and as it is one of the user testing methods that focuses on validating whether a product meets business requirements. User acceptance testing is typically run towards the end of the design sprints to verify whether the user's needs are satisfied. Please see below for a great introduction video on user testing from NN/g.
What are Usability Tests?
Usability testing is different compared to user tests because it focuses on evaluating whether users can complete specific tasks, aiming to identify usability issues and fix them to make sure that the product is working properly. When executed well, usability tests can increment the effectiveness of a product by evaluating how easy and efficient it is for users to complete specific tasks through your product. Usability testing can be divided into two main categories: qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative usability testing emphasizes understanding users’ experiences and emotions, while quantitative usability testing relies on analyzing numerical data. Both approaches involve observing how users interact with the product, examining their behavior, and identifying any obstacles they face. Below are some key reasons why usability testing is essential for enhancing your product’s user experience (UX):
- Lower Development Costs: Helps identify issues early, avoiding costly fixes after the product has launched.
- Identify Usability Issues: The primary purpose of usability testing is to uncover hidden usability problems and address them, resulting in a smoother and more intuitive user experience.
- Enhance User Experience: Resolving usability problems leads to a better user experience, boosting satisfaction and engagement.
- Increase conversions: Understand where users get confused and stuck in your product. Finding these problems and fixing them helps to provide smoother flow down the conversion funnel, ensuring your users are able to interact with your product and buy from you with ease.
As shown above, the goals and objectives of each of these testing methodologies are different. In summary, User testing focuses more on the user, trying to understand whether a product will actually solve a user's needs while usability testing is more focused on the product's UX quality and ease of use, measuring whether the key features are usable to help the user get their jobs done.
User Test vs Usability Testing - What Are The Key Differences?
User testing is a broader term that encompasses various methods and testing approaches aimed at understanding users’ needs, problems, and opinions. It involves gathering qualitative data through surveys, interviews, and focus groups to gain insights into user behavior and preferences.
On the other hand, usability testing is a specific type of testing that evaluates the functionality and ease of use of a product. The primary goal of usability testing is to identify usability issues and improve the user experience by observing how users interact with the product to complete specific tasks. This method focuses on collecting both qualitative and quantitative data to measure the product’s efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction. Qualitative usability testing, in particular, is very important in understanding users' experiences, thoughts, and feelings.
In summary, user testing is about understanding the user, while usability testing is about refining the product to ensure it meets user needs effectively.
User Test vs Usability Testing - What Are The Overlaps?
As mentioned previously user tests and usability testing are not mutually exclusive. As shown on the diagrams above, user tests and usability tests each have distinct as well as shared goals as you can see from the diagram above. As you can see, there are some goals that are shared between the two, including increasing efficiency, minimizing errors, improving ease of use and learnability.
From a broader perspective, usability testing can also be categorized as a subset of user test, as evaluating a product's functionality also involves understand whether a product is solving a user's needs.
User Testing vs Usability Testing - When Is the Right Timing?
In terms of ideal timing, user testing can occur throughout the design process but is typically run during the beginning stages to validate concepts and gather initial feedback. Because user testing includes any type of tests that are run with users, it can be conducted in any part of the UX design process, including brainstorming, planning as well as design and implementation.
In contrast, usability testing is usually conducted in the middle stages, once a prototype or finalized product is available. Thus, it's common for user testing to serve as the initial research and for usability testing to serve as a follow-up when the designs and prototypes are more solidified. As a last step, you can also run user acceptance tests, which is a more technical process that is run by engineers to validate business requirements and ensure that the product is ready for shipping.
As you start working on your projects, it's beneficial to huddle with the team and determine what the testing needs and scopes are so that everyone can be aligned about how user tests and usability testing will be incorporated throughout the project's execution.
User Research Tools & Methods For User Tests and Usability Tests
Needless to say, you can use a wide variety of user research tools and user testing methods to conduct both user testing as well as usability testing. Typically, user tests consist of familiar methodologies like surveys, focus groups and user interviews. Usability testing also is run via surveys, prototype tests, moderated interviews and in-depth focus groups. The diagram below shows the various types of methods that span across four different verticals. Moderated usability testing involves a researcher observing users during specific activities, uncovering insights and design issues as they guide the user through tasks. This method allows for direct interaction and immediate clarification of user feedback. Unmoderated usability testing allows participants to complete tasks independently, usually in their own environment. This type of testing provides genuine user interactions and can uncover issues that might not surface in a controlled setting. Tools like Hubble can capture user interactions, providing detailed insights with session recordings and navigation analysis. Depending on the project, you must consider the pros and cons of moderated vs unmoderated and determine the method that makes the most sense for your project.
The most important factor is to determine what types of user research insights you need to collect for your product. Depending on that, you should determine how you want to collect those user and usability testing insights.
Tips & Recommendations when choosing User Testing vs. Usability Testing
Audience and Participants
For both types of user research tests, you must figure out how to recruit participants for testing. Sometimes, you need to recruit users from participant pools that have not interacted with your product and other times, you must recruit users that have interacted with your product extensively. This is often one of the most time consuming and challenging aspects about testing so establishing a plan to source and recruit high quality participants for your research is very beneficial to ensure the tests are run on time and drive the maximum results. If you need additional help on finding the right B2B research participants, or any niche participants that are difficult to get a hold of, please check out this guide on finding participants for your projects.
Here are some guidelines you can follow to ensure that your tests are high quality:
- Define Clear Objectives: Write down what you want to learn from the test. Focus on specific questions or issues to ensure actionable results versus general, unfocused insights
- Prepare Scenarios and Tasks: Write a list of realistic scenarios and tasks that reflect how users would typically interact with your product
- Ask Open-Ended Questions: Please make sure to use open-ended questions like “What do you think about this feature?” or “How did you feel about that process?” to encourage detailed and honest feedback.
- Synthesize Results: After collecting data from the test, review the data to identify patterns and prioritize the most critical issues
Lastly, make sure to use the right usability testing tools that can yield the best results & takeaways. If you want more information on how Hubble can help with running various types of user tests & usability tests, click on the banner below to book a call with our sales team.
Usability Testing Series: Other Guides
Check out these other guides related to user and usability testing:
Usability Metrics that Matter: A Practical Approach to Measure Usability
Writing Effective Usability Test Scripts with Examples
A Guide to Usability Test Plans
Moderated vs. Unmoderated Usability Tests
The Best Usability Testing Tools
