It is a common situation when owners of some software hesitate if they really need usability testing. They do not understand what specific problems it can solve.

Qualitative methods (which include user experience research) directly depend on the task at hand. If the purposes and objectives of testing are vague, you can get interesting but irrelevant information, wasting time and the budget allocated for development.

Defining the Basic Purpose of Any UX Testing

Further, we’d like to present interesting recommendations, following which you can easily define the relevant objective of any user testing and get not only interesting conclusions but also really worthwhile test results.

Choosing a set of objects and prioritizing
You can choose any object of testing: a specific service, process, or even a group of web products. To do this, decide what specifically can be improved in your business processes? What problem appears on an ongoing basis?

But regarding priorities, here, first of all, it is necessary to highlight a couple of basic solutions and study them in turn. You can see which priorities are really important if you analyze your company’s annual goals, development strategies, markets that are being developed, statistics, and so on.

Bringing key indicators together
They can be financial, social, and quantitative. Also, you need to consider contacts to technical support, reviews of a product company, staff turnover, etc. If a company works with mass media, it will be extremely useful to analyze the comments under the news and press releases in Internet publications and social networks.

Search for blank spaces and work with hypotheses
If you find gaps in statistics, consider whether you understand why they are occurring. Think about how the process is built and how the developers/testers see it.

Record all emerging guesses and assumptions that may relate to the object of research and related actions.

What to Do When the Goal of UX Testing Is Defined?

As a rule, in the IT-sphere, user research is conducted and ordered by project managers or dedicated specialists who are responsible for providing a quality user experience.

Sometimes, this is done by marketing experts who can define the objective of exploratory usability testing. But to solve more complex tasks, there is the outsourcing of projects or teams of researchers from special IT integrators with the proper qualifications and experience.