What is Usability Testing

Usability testing is a technique to evaluate a product by testing it on users. Since the end user has to work on product ultimately it is best to do a usability testing before releasing the product to mass.

Usability testing measures the usability, or ease of use, of a specific object or set of objects, whereas general human-computer interaction studies attempt to formulate universal principles.


Goals
Usability testing is a black-box testing technique. The aim is to observe people using the product to discover errors and areas of improvement. Usability testing generally involves measuring how well test subjects respond in four areas: efficiency, accuracy, recall, and emotional response. The results of the first test can be treated as a baseline or control measurement; all subsequent tests can then be compared to the baseline to indicate improvement.

Four Areas 
Efficiency -- How much time, and how many steps, are required for people to complete basic tasks? (For example, find something to buy, create a new account, and order the item.)

Accuracy -- How many mistakes did people make? (And were they fatal or recoverable with the right information?)

Recall -- How much does the person remember afterwards or after periods of non-use?

Emotional response -- How does the person feel about the tasks completed? Is the person confident, stressed? Would the user recommend this system to a friend?

How to perform Localization Testing

Localization means translating your product or website to local language of that country. As companies grow their business in various countries, they make a localized version of their website.


Prepare and use the required test environment
If a web site is hosted in English and Japanese languages, it is not enough to simply change the default browser language and perform identical tests in both the languages. Depending on its implementation, a web site may figure out the correct language for its interface from the browser language setting, the regional and language settings of the machine, a configuration in the web application or other factors. Therefore, in order to perform a realistic test, it is imperative that the web site be tested from two machines – one with the English operating system and one with the Japanese operating system. You might want to keep the default settings on each machine since many users do not change the default settings on their machines.


Get correct translation
A native speaker of the language is usually the best resource to translate the text. However it is not easy to find a multi-lingual tester or have different people from different countries sit in one office.
In that case you might have to depend on translations tools available online like google translate wordreference.com and dictionary.com.


Start with testing control labels
Labels are the static content in the web site. English labels are usually short and translated versions tend to expand or contract in length depending on target language. It is important to spot any issues related to label truncation, overlay on/ under other controls, incorrect word wrapping etc.


Test error messages
It is important that the web site provides correct error messages in the other language. Most of the times error messages are hard coded in english language and while translating, developers forget to translate them.


Do test the data
Usually, multi-lingual web sites store the data in the UTF-8 Unicode encoding format. To check the character encoding for your website in mozilla: go to View -> Character Encoding and in IE go to View -> Encoding. Data in different languages can be easily represented in this format. Make sure to check the input data. It should be possible to enter data in the other language in the web site. The data displayed by the web site should be correct. The output data should be compared with its translation.


Be aware of cultural issues
A challenge in testing multi-lingual web sites is that each language might be meant for users from a particular culture. Many things such as preferred (and not preferred) colors, text direction (this can be left to right, right to left or top to bottom), format of salutations and addresses, measures, currency etc. are different in different cultures. Not only should the other language version of the web site provide correct translations, other elements of the user interface e.g. text direction, currency symbol, date format etc. should also be correct.