What is a Usability Testing Report?

A usability testing report states all key findings and insights that give a product design and development team a holistic evaluation and actionable recommendations to ensure the product's success. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to write a usability testing report, and you can download a report template for free.

First, why is a Usability Testing Report Necessary?

1. As a synthesis/analysis of your test data (functional)
2. The next step after collecting all the data (logical)
3. Allows you to group notable findings, prioritise issues (goal oriented)
4. Keeps team informed and focused on goal (team oriented)

Remember to:

1. Keep it short and sweet
2. Stick to key insights and actionable recommendations
3. The report is just a means to an end, the end being to improve the usability of a product through iteration
4. Use Google Slides (presentation software that's part of Google Drive) to create your report

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Structure of the Report

Title Page

Include:

• Your company logo (if applicable)
• The name of the company/product you’re preforming the usability test for
• The names of the researchers involved in conducting the report
• The date the report was created
• An image of the product you were testing or an on-brand graphic to make for a more eye catching title page (it's a presentation, after all)

Table of Contents

• This is also self explanatory
• List out each of the sections covered in your report
• If you wish for added navigability you can add page numbers

Executive Summary

• List out the most important findings from the tests you’ve run. So even if your stakeholders read nothing else, they'll learn this
• Include key findings, the purpose of the study, and how and where it took place
• Start by mentioning, how and why you tested the product
• Don’t worry if you don’t include everything - you can elaborate in the section on Participant Profiles
• Finally, use statistics to highlight the main factors of the study e.g. How many participants completed the tasks successfully? etc.
• When presented in this way, stakeholders will retain more of the information you ultimately want them to factor when making decisions.
• This section may be a couple of pages long

Goals

• Your goals should be clear and concise so your team can refer back to them after testing to understand what aspects of the product work and what needs improvement
• Clearly indicate the main objectives you wanted to accomplish while conducting user testing
• Elaborate on each goal in 1-2 sentences
• State what the main objectives are

Methodology

• Is where you’ll lay out the "how" of your research in plain language
• Say:
  • How you screened them
  • The channels used to reach them
  • And if you conducted the test online or in-person

Participant Profiles

• Add a summary including age range and other details about your testing group
• Elaborate on key details, including professional background, age and income and gender when applicable

Tasks Tested

• Here, list all the steps you asked users to complete

Post Test Questions

• If you wanted to gain a deeper understanding of how users feel about the product, you can ask them some questions after the test has ended
• Here are some examples of post test questions:

Results

• Here you’ll show stakeholders how you organized, analyzed and synthesized all of the data collected during your usability testing research
• Create different categories to group your findings in. This will make it easier to understand how you came up with certain numbers and conclusions
• Give a general overview of results
• Add “positive” and “negative” at the bottom of each category and analyse the positive and negative observations and data in a paragraph or two
• You can include relevant quotes from a participant or important statistic that reinforces the findings in this section
• Use charts/supporting images/video/tables/or text to highlight distinctions among result categories

Bugs & Issues

• Give an overview of the bugs or issues and divide them into categories for deeper understanding
• Describe errors, issues with display, and functionality
• You can also include images or videos of the issues to give your development team more reference

Key Findings & Recommendations

• After analyzing your usability testing research, create a list of recommendations and action items based on findings
• Use action words like “Make”, “Have” and Do for actionability etc. These items should be consistent with the feedback you’ve gathered from the users during testing
• Separate into categories for example “Major”, “Moderate” and “Minor” to help prioritise

Disclaimer

• A disclaimer is how you can account for bias in a report - when it comes to UX research, I can't overstate this enough
• There might be various factors that influenced the results of the usability testing. It’s important to identify and list them in your report
• Some examples of question include:

Appendix

• Here you can include related links to notes, documents, data, media resources or notable quotes
• Besides keeping consistent with professional standards, an appendix will make it easier for your team to access the resources they want to dig deeper into after reading your report

Conclusion

• Finally, Conclude your usability testing report with a “thank you”, your logo, and links to your website and contact information if you wish

Next Step

• Set up meeting to share findings with everyone in order to prioritise issues and work towards goal of improving product
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FAQ

• What is a usability testing report?
  A usability testing report states all key findings and insights that give a product design and development team a holistic evaluation and actionable recommendations to ensure the product's success.If you are looking for a usability testing report template or sample, you must not miss out on our step-by-step guide and download a report template for free.

• How to create a good usability testing report or presentation?
  Here're some tips: keep it short and sweet; stick to key insights and actionable recommendations; the report is to improve the usability of a product through iteration; use Google Slides (presentation software that's part of Google Drive) to create your report.

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