5 Usability Testing Tools & Platforms That Ensure Awesome UX

Saying that the desired user experience is essential for ensuring commercial success may sound clichéd, but it still holds true as every business is relentlessly working towards ensuring the same. Irrespective of the industry or the domain, the user experience is critical to ensure that the brand performs in the market as expected. As a recent news report suggests, even a media giant such as Condé Nast International needs to deploy and use usability testing tools and platforms for multiple research projects, such as surveys, prototype testing for new websites, and test various designs and layouts.

Moreover, enterprises need testing platforms and tools that enable them to test continuously through the development lifecycle, and even support Agile methodologies and sprint cycles. This can practically support development and testing teams to prioritize key design and layout changes in advance, mainly before they plan online updates or new application launches. Usability Testing adopts a user-oriented interaction technique to assess the product or application. It is inevitable as it provides direct feedback on how the user deals with the application and experiences it.

It is definitely getting tougher to ensure the quality of the web and mobile software applications. Nevertheless, these can be built by keeping the user needs and ideas into perspective, and by making usability testing tools, platforms, and practices an integral part of the software development lifecycle in the best possible way, offering an experience that will keep users coming back to experience your product / software / application.

Likewise, there are some basic questions that you need to ask while building a testing plan for your product, such as:

• Where is my user based?
• What’s the category of my user?
• What are my user’s expectations?
• What will be the expected spike in traffic during varying hours?
• What is the range of devices a user has, or might leverage?
• How will the application get deployed and across which network configurations?

These are some fundamental queries that can help you build the base for implementing usability testing tools and practices, and further enable you to leverage the right tool(s).

5 Usability Testing tools and platforms

Right from recruiting real users, to organizing real-time remotely moderated tests, to evaluating the usability changes with A/B testing, Usability Testing implements a range of tools to ensure the required user experience (UX). It is interesting to know how different tools with various features ensure a holistic and desired user experience.

We have tried to put together 5 Usability Testing tools and platforms that can be diversely used for the various testing objectives of your organization.

eggPlant

It is a licensed GUI automation testing tool that has been developed by combining eggPlant Functional TestPlant Mobile VNCserver services. eggPlant Functional is known for executing mobile tests by applying native gateway agents that enable the testers to connect live mobile devices or emulators directly. The key highlight of the tool is that it takes an image-based UI testing approach for testing UX of mobile apps. This effectively cuts down the testing efforts, costs, and even the time that is needed for cross-device and cross-platform mobile app testing.

eggPlant is an automation tool that is popularly implemented for UI Automation testing, UI functional testing, image-based testing, Mobile testing, network testing, and web testing with capabilities for cross-browser testing.

Official site: eggPlant

Ranorex

Ranorex is a popularly implemented open source automation and testing platform for UI automation framework, specifically for native mobile apps and Web Apps testing. With GUI testing and Web testing, the platform also performs Acceptance Testing, Automation Testing, and Mobile Testing with capabilities for data-driven testing and cross-browser testing.

It is been regarded as an absolutely resourceful testing platform for testing on native iOS, Android, the web, and Mono Touch devices too.

Official site: Ranorex

SeeTestAutomation

SeeTest, an automation testing platform from Experitest is very much popular amongst testers for some key highlights and features. It comprises key testing domains such as Cloud for remote testing on online device lab, automation tools for running same tests on various devices, and in the context of Usability Testing, it offers Network Virtualization for simulating real-time network fluctuations for UX testing. Moreover, it also supports responsive UI testing within a continuous integration environment.

Official site: SeeTest

Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool

This tool from Google developers can be used across different devices, such as smartphones, tablets, desktops, and even wearables while testing. It supports a wide range of mobile OS platforms – Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and more. Google Mobile can be a free tool if you select a responsive temple for your website that will adapt to any device that the user might use. It can be used as a free tool for professionals who are into mobile application development.

The tool helps to make websites and any kind of web applications compatible across devices with high-performance UX.

Official site: Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool

CRAZY EGG

Crazy Egg is a click-based user experience tool that comes with a free 30-day trial. With this usability testing tool you would be able to figure out the behavior of the user. For instance, with the Heatmap you would know where the user has clicked on your site, with the Scrollmap you can gauge how far the user has scrolled on the page, the Confetti gives an idea regarding search terms, visitor sources, and other aspects of the website. By enabling some other features you would be able to breakdown various points such as number of clicks, interest areas of the user, the time spent on a particular section, and so on.

Official site: Crazy Egg

In Conclusion

There are multiple free and licensed tools that development and testing teams can leverage. Yet, nothing can work out if the right usability testing strategy is not adopted and implemented. Whether the testing expertise comes from within the organization or from an independent testing partner; it is important to leverage the same for tangible results. Usability Testing is more than essential for successfully implementing Digital Transformation initiatives.

Cigniti’s Digital assurance & testing solutions address the multi-faceted needs of digital transformation testing. With our digital assurance solution, you can add customer centricity and agility to your assurance approach for improved customer satisfaction and increased business. Connect with us to build applications that offer the much needed high performance User Experience.