Captivating a user is a challenge, so providing functions that solve their needs and that are also close to their tastes and affinities is not a plus but a must. Hence the importance of testing.
Users are transformed, the ecosystem is changing, the competition is relentless, and the technology giant has no limits. This is the scenario today for companies, start ups and ventures.
For this reason, the technology teams of any organization in the world must have the capacity to respond to different areas : they have heterogeneous knowledge, they are increasingly specializing and they need to have collaborators who have information and experience in all kinds of skills.
For example, a company that wants to launch an e-commerce will have to consider a multidisciplinary team, in which there is at least one content expert, one or more experts in interface experience and user experience, who also support the exercise of test, additionally, you must have a developer, a digital designer, staff dedicated to the marketing strategies of the online store, an SEO expert and an analytics expert.
Although each step in the chain is important, there is an invaluable task in this exercise and that is testing.
What is testing?
Testing is nothing more than making tests that allow users to interact intuitively , that is, they can express themselves and naturally take ownership of the functions without telling them if their answers are good or bad: everything is valid.
After the interaction, the different answers are analyzed and reviewed by the team of experts and evaluated with some journeys to find out if the users who participated in the test behaved as expected by the technology or functionality that was being tested. With this information, the teams make adjustments and then go productive.
Erika Santa Correa, user experience expert, shares here some ideas about the importance of carrying out a testing process prior to presenting a functionality in production:
- In the customer-focused design process, it is vital to understand the user very well and make an empathetic observation of him; his place cannot be exactly assumed because one can fall into traps such as assuming behaviors that may be natural for companies, but for the user can be confusing. Testing is a moment of truth, it is the moment of the user or audience for whom a function is being developed.
- Testing in the product development process is one of the moments that allows the user-centered design theory to materialize. Additionally, the creation of the User/persona (a general descriptive personification of the user to whom the product is directed), the previous investigations, the field work with the user and the interviews that allow us to understand who will use the product are important . However, after having followed the previous steps with special care, the test is the moment of truth because that audience for whom the product has been designed will have the opportunity to interact, evaluate and test everything that has been designed. designed.
“With my knowledge working with teams to design website experiences, these moments have been crucial. For example, once we had a simple and revealing situation when we were designing a premium catalog of items, the design was aesthetically amazing, it had the biggest role in the display of the product. And although the test yielded positive results, there was one point that we did not expect: e-commerce I didn’t have an explicit path to return to the previous menu. Our hypothesis based on previous experiences was that the user would use the basic browsing patterns of the browser, however, users were stuck in a part of the purchase process because they couldn’t find how to get out of the current point; a critical finding for conversion and purchase flows. This finding led us to make some design tweaks by explicitly incorporating the way to continue shopping.”
From this case, the importance of applying testing to users is demonstrated, since functions that may seem obvious to the developer team are not really obvious to the user and with this tool you can check and know in detail what should be done . adjust to meet audience expectation. Undoubtedly, a fundamental tool for the marketing strategies of organizations.
There are different types of tests: functional, non-functional, structural, regression, among others. To find out which one is best for your strategy, the first thing you must be clear about is the objective and with this, choose the methodology that helps you solve it.
