AI-powered UX Testing: Benefits and Best Practices
Artificial intelligence has already made so many aspects of our life easier, and the field of user experience (UX) hasn’t been left out either. User experience had been already progressing at a steady rate, but the integration of AI gave this field an amazing boost. AI is a new yet essential part of UX design, as it helps to analyze survey responses, establish patterns, generate tests for coding, detect visual bugs, and much more. With the help of AI’s natural language processing, machine learning algorithms, and other abilities, the new UX designs have gotten more responsive, easier to use, and even easier on the eyes. Keep reading to learn more about the benefits of using AI to test UX and the best AIs for this job.
Benefits of Using AI for UX Testing
Machine learning and recognizing algorithms open a new window into the user’s preferences and behavior. The more UX designers know about the users, the more they can tailor the product to their needs. As for testing, these are some of the ways artificial intelligence can be helpful:
- There’ll be more time to experiment: As a UX designer, you can create new concepts to test and see which works better for your target audience. There’s also no need to dedicate a significant amount of time to research because AI automates this process and gathers real-time data about your audience for you to make the product better constantly.
- You can say goodbye to time-consuming traditional methods: Without AI, testing a user experience design involves doing surveys or focus groups, but with the help of AI, you can skip many steps to these methods and save a lot of time and money.
- The information is more accurate: Not only is AI quicker, but it also gives us more reliable data about user experience. By identifying trends and analyzing more data, you can pinpoint the issues and make improvements more accurately. Moreover, by using platforms such as UserTesting.com, which is powered by AI, you’ll reach a much wider audience. This directly translates to a more accurate understanding of people’s responses to your product.
- It’s a great tool for usability testing: Usability testing is done by observing how potential users
will interact with an app or website and how easy it is to navigate it. Usually, the subjects will be given the product, and they will be recorded as they use different parts of the application or website. This method provides the most helpful information regarding getting rid of bugs and design flaws but can lead to hours of footage. AI has taken over many ways of usability testing, which will be explained further in the rest of the article.
- There’s room for more frequent testing: Testing user experience isn’t something you just do at the end of the project, but it’s a constantly changing part of the design. Using AI will make testing much quicker and won’t hold up the project.
How Does AI-powered UX Testing Work?
These are some of the functions AI can serve to help with UX testing:
- Gathering data with the help of real users;
- Organizing piles of raw data into a qualitative report
- Analyzing usability testing sessions;
- Recognizing patterns in reviews and surveys;
- Creating tests and surveys with every update of the product;
- Finding visual bugs;
- Writing Java test units.
Creating any product requires a lot of research, leading to a big data pile. This information later has to be organized, deciphered, and thoroughly analyzed. But today, you can train AI to recognize patterns and interpret user data in no time. A real-life example is Google Analytics, which creates detailed reports instead of quantitative data.
Also, you can use AI to make a questionnaire for users, then analyze the given data with software like OCR. Not only can you get numbers with questionnaires, but a trained AI can interact with users directly and get qualitative reports. There are also platforms that detect visual bugs in the product or write Java unit tests to help with faster development.
The Role of AI in Usability Testing
You can’t have usability testing without the help of humans, but AI is here to help us as a handy tool. Testing UX with AI is especially efficient in these aspects of the job:
Taking Notes of the User’s Input
When researching and testing UX in the real world, you need to listen carefully to what the users say and take thorough notes of their experience with the product. Usually, to do this, you must record their opinions and transcribe them into data, but with the help of AI, you’ll have the transcriptions within minutes. Not only will these AI make transcriptions of the recordings, but they can also add time stamps. Some of the best transcribing AI services are Otter.ai, Trint, and HappyScribe.
Attention Prediction With Eye-tracking Heat Map
To understand the user’s experience, you should have an idea of what draws their attention and how they take in the interface. With eye-tracking technology, you can create heat maps of where people look the most and the flow of their gaze through the screens. Although to do this UX test, you’ll need expensive equipment and a lot of time-consuming work. AI-powered tools like AttentionInsight, Expoze, and VisualEyes can predict where the user’s attention will be based on the design’s appearance. These tools have proven 90% accurate when compared to humans.
By making an AI-generated heat map of your interface, you can eliminate elements that distract the user from important information. Also, it’s a good way to ensure that people are paying attention to the most important parts of the design, such as the “call to action” elements.
Highlighting the Important Part of a Video
As we’ve already mentioned, usability testing in UX involves watching a user use your product, which could be presented as a video. The user’s interaction with the product can take hours, so it would be considerably hard and time-consuming to do this for multiple users. This is how you can use AIs like Pictory and Piktostory to solve this Issue:
- Upload the video to get a transcription of the video;
- Skim the text to find the important parts that you want to see;
- Have AI create short videos of the details you’ve time-stamped.
You Can Have the Full Package
Some AI-powered platforms, such as Loop11, UserZoom, and UserTesting, allow UX designers to conduct user testing remotely and automate the entire data-collecting process. These tools serve all the functions we mentioned above and also do wonders for simplifying reports.
Another excellent example of AI for UX testing is WEVO, which uses AI technology as well as user input to determine the quality of the user’s experience in all aspects. With WEVO, the UX researchers only need to identify the experience and target audience. This AI will send standard tests to a target group picked from more than 30 million users, sort through the responses and evaluates the experience, generates insights, and makes recommendations.
AI and Testing for Visual Bugs
One of the most important parts of user experience is the visual aspect of the product. Visual bugs can prevent the user from using the product, causing it to fail completely. Sometimes it appears as little details, like a misplaced text or a nulled-out title. The traditional ways of finding these bugs usually won’t register details like this, and if everything is present in the design and serves a function, then it’s considered fine, even if it’s a distorted mess to the human eyes. Visual AI tools can easily compare two photos and find changes in your interface, so if you feed them images of what the product should look like, they can alert you as soon as something is off, even by a few pixels.
The Best AI-powered UX Testing Tools and What They Offer
There’s a plethora of AI services out there, and not all of them are suitable for UX testing. These are some of the best AI tools that help you with testing user experience:
1. UserTesting
UserTesting is a powerful AI-powered platform and a comprehensive tool for testing UX and the usability of digital products. What makes this platform stand out against the rest is an impressive pool of real human users that can test your apps, websites, and prototypes to give valuable feedback. The testing methods are varied and can be categorized into moderated and unmoderated. There’s also the variety of its users, who come from different cultures and backgrounds, and bring usability testing to a new level.
UserTesting AI writes the test in a very digestible manner, and the reports are just as straightforward. Also, this tool can work wonders for small companies, as it offers exceptional services for a reasonable price. Keep in mind, UserTesting.com is considered to be a rather traditional platform, as it still relies heavily on focus groups and surveys. Due to this fact, UX testing might become more time-consuming. It’s also more loyal to the old methods of testing rather than AI, so you might lose some of the advantages of using this new technology.
2. Applitools
The Applitools software platform is a useful tool for perfecting the visual elements and UX of your application. This platform can seamlessly compare the app’s interface with images of the intended interface to detect any visual bugs. This platform can be used on multiple devices and keep track of the web version as well as the app. No matter what the screen resolution, browser, or device, you can keep a consistent interface everywhere. Applitools can detect problems in font, color, and layout and also let you know if there are bugs or missing interactable elements.
3. Poll the People
Poll the People is a survey tool that can be used for UX design. This platform uses natural language processing to create surveys and give an efficient report of the results. By using Poll the People, you can get quantitative data from surveys, find trends with the help of machine learning algorithms, and get feedback on UX from a wide range of users. If you’re planning to do A/B user testing, this platform will let you accomplish this faster and with lower costs.
Combining traditional methods with AI is the best way to get accurate data and process it efficiently. Poll the People offers this service at a fraction of other platforms’ costs.
4. Testim
This UX testing tool is exceptional when it comes to generating tests and analyzing user behavior in response to the interface. Testim also helps the quality assurance teams to find bugs and inform the design team faster. By using this platform, you no longer have to worry about constantly generating tests and maintaining them. Not only will Testim create tests for you, but it will also update them with every change to the application or website. Another advantage of using Testim is easily integrating it with most collaboration and development tools commonly used between teams.
5. UserZoom
UserZoom is a cloud-based platform with many interesting services. This tool offers various methods such as tree testing, usability testing, card sorting, etc. On top of that users can analyzing data and reports, which can result in boosting your outputs. You can also generate insight from user testing results. Finally it also makes recommendations based on patterns in user behavior.
6. TestComplete
TestComplete specializes in UX testing and offers one-of-a-kind automated testing. You can use this tool across many platforms like desktop, web, and mobile applications to get feedback on UI elements and the user experience. To create tests with TestComplete, you’ll need very little coding knowledge, so it’s perfectly usable for those without a tech background. If you need to script complex scenarios and advanced customization, you’ll be happy to know that TestComplete supports JavaScript, VBScript, and Python.
7. Maze
Maze is a great tool to help you better understand user behavior and take action based on that information. This platform’s user-friendly interface will allow you to test the usability of a digital product, such as an application or a website.
8. Katalon Studios
Katalon Studios is an AI-powered platform explicitly made for test automation. With this tool you can easily create flexible tests in 1 minute. You can also build a command center to organize tests, which can become for those running many tests everyday. Another advantage of Katalon Studios is that you can run parallel tests across devices. Beside these you will be informed with real-time notifications, which can be very handy.
9. Diffblue
Diffblue’s purpose is to let developers focus on making the best software products without losing much time for testing. This platform can write a full Java unit test as quickly as every two seconds. By eliminating the need for unit testing, Diffblue will save you time and effort and make it more enjoyable because no one likes the repetitive and tedious chore of writing and maintaining unit tests.
Diffblue also allows you to translate code into Jave, migrate your app to the cloud, and pinpoint regression early in the project with continuous testing.
Final Thoughts
AI is now an inseparable part of our lives, so as a UX designer, you should use this powerful tool to speed up your testing process and improve certain aspects of UX testing. Regardless of your method of testing, AI-powered platforms can help you create tests, organize and analyze their results, and find patterns in reviews to help you improve the product. Keep in mind that AI-powered tools still need much supervision, and it’s up to UX researchers and testers to bring out the best of them with their experience and technical knowledge.