Usability testing with Optimal Workshop

Usability testing is the practice of testing a product – like a website or an app – with representative users.

It’s best to conduct usability testing regularly throughout a project, using the findings and insights to make informed product decisions and iterate and improve over time.

We’ve released a brand new usability testing functionality to our qualitative research tool, Reframer.

New feature: Tasks functionality in Reframer

A common way of performing usability testing is to observe how participants complete tasks given to them. To support this use case, we’ve now added the ability to set tasks for your participants in Reframer. This will allow you and your team to capture notes in the context of those tasks and synthesize your data accordingly.

So what is a task?

A task is a predefined activity that your participants perform during a usability test. Tasks should represent similar goals that people try to carry out on your app or website (for example, adding something to their cart for checkout). 

Good tasks have an accompanying scenario for additional context and are relatable without being too leading or directive. 

Here’s an example of a good task:

• You’re planning a 3-day return road trip with your family and want to find the rates for the cheapest rental car. Book the cheapest rental car you can find for your holiday.

Utilizing tasks will make your team’s usability testing processes easier: interviewers can now set up a test plan in-app; note-takers can easily follow the test and capture observations along the way, in the context of those tasks; and researchers no longer need to tag observations with tasks anymore. It’s also much easier to slice and dice analysis based on tasks.

How to use tasks in Reframer

Using tasks in Reframer is easy. When you know what tasks you want to include in your usability test, you can add them while you’re setting up your Reframer study on the ‘Tasks’ tab. Once you set up your tasks, the observations you capture will be associated with each task as you progress through them in your session. Now, you can start using them during your usability testing sessions.

When you’re ready to start capturing observations related to a task, you can press “Start tasks” or just click on the task in the sidebar on the right.

Learn how to set up tasks in your Reframer study by reading our Help Center article.

Making the world’s greatest qualitative research tool

We’re constantly working to build the world’s best UX research platform, and part of this means supporting a variety of different qualitative and quantitative workflows.

Adding the tasks functionality to Reframer is just one of the many improvements that we’re making to the Optimal Workshop platform to support your usability testing – and qualitative research – workflows. Stay tuned for more exciting announcements!