Usability Testing Of Your App

Testing your mobile app for usability means following the best practices in app design. It is recommended if you want to keep your users. You need focus groups to test the app during its creation and after development. This process has its own drawbacks even when it is done with the traditional methods.

Apparently, you will prefer real individuals as well as a fraction of the target audience to do the app testing. These people will report any unappealing feature or missing feature in its user interface. App testing is the most direct way to know the strength of an app and its weaknesses.

The problem with this type of testing is that the process affects the mindset of the beta testers. They know they are watched and this affects their usage of the app, the gestures and the time spent using different features.

On the technical side of app design, the intending app can also perform differently during testing and during use after release. Every mobile app development company’s fear is having an unresponsive app because of distorted results on gesture uses. This can affect the app usability and user experience.

Just like in quantitative analytics, you need numerical data to know more about your app gesture usage. It has a serious drawback; it can’t help the app developers to visualize important user inputs.

It is true that about 25 percent of users try to swipe up and display the full menu. Developers have no clue why they do this. However, with heat maps, they will have a clue. App developers India experts must harness this qualitative analytics tool to get results for a better UI/UX.

Heatmaps is an analytics tool that aggregates data on different gestures used in interacting with apps. Some of these gestures include double-taps, taps, pinches, and swipes. The data is visually presented in the form of a heatmap placed on the app. The heatmap makes it clearer to spot the areas that users are interacting with and the frequency of the interaction.

Color codes are used to depict the frequency of the interaction with a normal heatmap gradient that is red and blue. The red depicts places that are frequented the most while the blue stands for the exact opposite. Finding the least and the most navigation elements, features and app pages will be far easier.

Usability Testing and Touch Heatmaps

Usability testing basically means understanding the UX and UI elements to ensure that the new app is responsive and intuitive. It ensures that the users can use it to solve problems quickly, without a hassle. This is why testing for usability is essential to find all unresponsive gestures.

Sadly, there are app developers that do not take note of the unresponsive gestures and don’t know that such gestures, when left unattended can tarnish the image of the app developer and the month of hard work. The unresponsive gestures occur when the user interacts with your app, and the app fails to respond to the command.

There are lots of reasons why an app feature will be unresponsive. It may be a bug. Bugs can affect app function. It could also be caused by using a wrong gesture like double tapping instead of swiping. Also, another culprit could be the fact that a user is attempting to interact with an element that was never meant to be interacted with. An example of this is thinking an image is clickable or swiping away the final screen of the app.

Whether it is caused by a wrong command or wrong gesture, unresponsive gestures can spell doom for the app and need to be addressed immediately. Using the traditional quantitative analytics cannot produce the valuable insight on these unresponsive gestures. Even when focus groups discover such unresponsive gestures, they fail to react as real users would. They are aware that they are testing and so won’t be frustrated like the real user who may even uninstall or abandon the app. Developers can benefit from using heatmaps for this problem.

Tracing Patterns

Following up with unresponsive gestures has to be fundamental for all app developers and managers. However, it is not the only benefit of touch heatmaps for app usability problems. Using this tool, developers and managers can spot usage patterns, which may cause UI/UX problems such as a non-uniform appearance of the app on different screen resolutions. The app design is broken when this problem arises. Android developers must ensure that they test apps because the devices have a variety of sizes and shapes.

Even though the iPhone is getting bigger with a larger screen and the iPad is stronger, screen optimization must be done across all the operating systems for uniformity and responsiveness. Using heatmaps, app developers can easily tell if the app elements are displayed off-screen or when the screen sizes affect the app’s design.

Again, there is a small problem of distraction. Are users distracted by app elements that they ordinarily shouldn’t be distracted by? Using touch heatmaps, developers can easily discover the features that distract users. When you find them, focus on the essential functions alone. If you don't implement this app design, users of the app may be distracted. Use polls of focus groups to determine what is missing in the app screen so you can know how to improve on the app.

Usability of mobile app

Usability testing will always be an important factor when building a well planned and successful app. However, after a decade of mobile app development, the expectations of the users have changed drastically. With them, a developers approach to mobile app testing for usability must change.

Even though so of the classic techniques have survived through the turbulent tides of the app development industry, new ones are rising to fill all the blanks in important areas. Regulating focus groups and making arrangements for people to test the app is vital. The use of the quantitative analytics tool and numerical data will continue to be on the rise.

Experts in app development are looking for ways to use touch heatmaps during the usability testing to track and get rid of unresponsive gestures. It also traces all patterns of user behavior and highlights the distraction of the user. These unique features help developers to have a clear and unbiased view of their apps so that they can build better apps that won't be abandoned by users.