1. How to Conduct Quick
Usability Tests for iOS and
Android Applications
Stanfy Publications
Exploring Mobile Space

2. Stanfy Publications
www.stanfy.com
Stanfy ©2013, some rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Learning about your customers is key to making great and successful products. You can choose to invest in
launching an app and then discover whether it works, or learn what your customers think about the product
before you invest a lot of time and money into development. I doubt anyone would select the first option,
right?
The usability testing sessions have become an essential component of any mobile product we are currently
working on. It gives the unique opportunity to receive feedback at the early stages of the design process, be-
fore the development has even planned. Such experiments teach us about the expectations and preferences
of target users while helping us to come up with the right app design.
We would like to share with you our approach for quick and cheap usability tests for mobile applications. It
works best with a small set of testers (up to 5 people) and allows you to rapidly find out about usability prob-
lems so you can fix them faster.
ABOUT STANFY PUBLICATIONS
Stanfy is a mobile design and development team specializing in mobile
UI/UX and native iOS & Android app development. Since 2009 we’ve
been creating successful mobile apps for companies from different
fields of business. We сlosely follow newest mobile trends in marketing,
design and tech fields, constantly apply them in our work and share our
findings with the mobile entrepreneurs community.
With this publication we’d like to share our experience in building mobile
apps and the results of our internal investigations in mobile space.
Stanfy Publications
www.stanfy.com

3. Stanfy Publications
www.stanfy.com
Stanfy ©2013, some rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Preparation
1. Bring participants who would actually use your mobile app. “The maximum benefit-cost ratio is achieved
when using between three and five subjects,” wrote Jakob Nielsen. This reduces the overhead of indi-
vidual tests and makes it easier to conduct them more frequently.
2. Prepare a design prototype that you are going to test. As this is usability testing, make sure your proto-
type is close enough to a final product. For our tests, we usually create interactive design prototypes that
work like a realistic app on the smartphone.
3. Write down the scenario and the list of tasks. The scenario should give the user an understanding of the
circumstances he is currently in. For example, “we are going to pretend that you are at a conference,
and you are taking notes from the keynote presentation…” Choose tasks that are essential to your app
like taking notes, buying product, using coupons, paying bills, etc. Print the task list and scenario.
4. Put all screens you are going to test into a Google Drive Presentation – each screen on a separate page.
You will use it for making notes while conducting usability tests. Find a person who will take notes. You
also can try to record video of your user testing session, but we have found that it is quite hard to record
details from the app screen and very time consuming to set it all up.
5. Ensure that the room for your user tests has a comfortable place for your participants and yourself,
proper lighting, and no noise or unwelcome distractions.
6. Don’t forget to print the legally required documents, such as an NDA. Be ready to quickly explain your
documents to your participants.

4. Stanfy Publications
www.stanfy.com
Stanfy ©2013, some rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Conducting tests
1. Welcome your participants and offer a short icebreaker. It is important that the user feels comfortable
and behaves naturally when working with your app. Tell your participants that it’s the app that is being
tested, not them, and if they can’t do something, they should know it’s not their fault.
2. Before diving into tasks, get the user familiar with the app, tell them the scenario and ask for initial feed-
back on what they would expect from the app.
3. While taking notes, focus on a few key aspects like friction points where people hesitate, do something
unexpected, get something wrong or get stuck, conflicts between user expectations and your application
behavior; facial expressions can be a cue into people’s true feelings about what they are seeing.
4. Give participants one task at a time. More than this may intimidate them or be distracting. From our ex-
perience, a user feels more comfortable when he can see the task printed so he doesn’t need to remem-
ber the task while you are speaking.
5. Do not alter the test results by providing clues, suggesting directions or by reacting to things user say or
do. All feedback you give must be neutral. Do not start shaking your head or nodding :). The only time
you should speak is to help the participant give an opinion, or to clarify a response.
6. After all the tasks have been completed, gather as much information as possible. Ask for overall impres-
sions of the app that will allow you to judge whether expectations have been met. Always ask for sug-
gestions that may provide insights into how the app can be better.

5. Stanfy Publications
www.stanfy.com
Stanfy ©2013, some rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Summarising, planning next
design iteration
1. Try to make a summary of your user test right away after the last participant has left the room. ‘
2. Share your overall impression, and then screen by screen discuss what you have found and what pos-
sible solutions could be. Do not postpone the analysis to the next day as you definitely will forget the
details and sometimes they are the key.
Happy testing! :)