As anyone who has been disappointed by a slow, janky mobile app will tell you, your app can still be bad, even if it ticks all the boxes on your requirements analysis.
That’s why usability testing for mobile apps is so important. Consistent usability testing ensures that your app is actually enjoyable to use – and minimizes the risk of uninstalls, churn, poor reviews, and negative brand perception as a result.
New to the game? This 101 guide walks you through what usability testing is, the key steps to setting up and running tests, and how you can make the process easier, more accurate, and more efficient using agentic AI.
What is Usability Testing?
Usability testing evaluates how real users interact with your app. Rather than relying on the assumptions and opinions of your engineers, you observe users completing tasks, analyze where they struggle, and refine the experience based on real behavior.
In usability testing for mobile apps specifically, this usually involves:
- Navigating onboarding flows
- Signing up or logging in
- Searching or browsing content
- Completing a purchase or conversion action
- Using core features repeatedly
- Recovering from errors or confusing states
Usability tests don’t verify that the app functions per requirements. Instead, they provide super valuable info on how intuitive your app is to use, the clarity of key user journeys, and whether users enjoy your app enough to keep coming back.
Why usability testing for mobile apps matters so much
Apps don’t (just) fail because they break. Even if they perform correctly and reliably, users will quickly abandon any software that is confusing, slow, or generally frustrating to use.
This is even more true for mobile apps, which often compete for users’ attention with the world around them – your users might be using one hand, distracted, or dealing with inconsistent network conditions whilst on their phone. This leaves much less room for error, especially as an app store full of competing products is just a couple of taps away.
Usability testing for mobile apps protects against that risk. By verifying whether your app is as joyful to use as you think it is, you unlock better user engagement and retention, better reviews, fewer calls through to your support team, and a stronger, more positive brand identity.
How to Perform Usability Testing for Mobile Apps
1. Define Your Goals and KPIs
Define what you’re trying to learn. This will give you measurable outcomes you can track, rather than a pile of unrelated insights that don’t point to any concrete action. You might want to understand:
- Can users complete onboarding without assistance?
- Can new users discover key features within three taps?
- Do users successfully check out on the first attempt?
- How long does it take users to complete core actions?
- Where do users hesitate or abandon workflows?
These should reflect user needs. Equally, don’t neglect goals based on business outcomes, for example ease of upgrading subscriptions. This is how your app generates revenue, and is as important for your longevity as more user-centered issues.
Agentic AI systems like Momentic’s can ingest roadmap documents, release notes, and even design files to outline user journeys, key objectives, and KPIs. This is especially useful for large, complex apps where mapping every user journey by hand is tedious and time-consuming.
What to Measure
Smart selection of quality metrics helps you understand users’ experience of your app, and provides a benchmark for your team to improve on. Depending on your goals, you could consider:
- Task completion and success rate
- Time on task
- Error rate
- Satisfaction rating
- Number of navigation steps taken to reach a given goal
- User satisfaction, via post-task or post-test surveys
- Cognitive load cues, such as hesitation or backtracking
- Engagement signals, such as scrolling, dwell time, and feature discovery
2. Identify Your Test Audience
Good participant selection is a fundamental part of good test design. You want your app to be tested by the type of people you expect to be using it.
Think back to your target audience – their age range, geographic location, language, technical proficiency, and accessibility needs. This should provide the basics for testing panel selection. Your participants should accurately reflect diversity in device types, connection speeds, and screen sizes.
AI testing software can supplement work carried out by human testing panels via exploratory testing agents. These can explore your app autonomously in the same way a human tester might, providing immediate actionable insights without the time costs of assembling a representative human panel.
Should you rely on it exclusively? Probably not – your app will be used by people, so people should test it. Equally, AI-enabled usability testing for mobile apps is a great way to make some quick wins and fix obvious errors before your testing panel gets hold of your app – you get a deeper level of insight as a result, as the testing panel isn’t distracted by obvious errors.
3. Choose the Right Test Format
There’s no ‘right answer’ here – different teams will benefit from different formats. Consider:
Moderated usability testing
A moderator observes testers in real time, asking questions about the thought processes of testers. Highly insightful; highly resource-intensive.
Unmoderated usability testing
Users complete tasks independently while their screen interactions, taps, gestures, and comments are captured automatically. Less insightful, but efficient, scalable, and CI-friendly.
Remote usability testing
Participants test from anywhere on their own devices. This tends to reflect real-world usage more accurately than lab environments.
In-person testing
Useful when testing hardware dependencies, body gestures, kiosk apps, or physical interactions alongside digital interfaces.
AI-assisted usability testing
AI agents autonomously explore your app and flag matters for concern. Not a substitute for human testers, but more efficient at catching obvious errors.
4. Create realistic scenarios and tasks
You want to test how users interact with your app on their own terms. So, keep test cases open-ended and resist the temptation to provide over-detailed instructions for each task.
For example:
- “Create an account and save your preferences for later.”
- “Find and purchase an item under $30.”
- “Book an appointment within the next two weeks.”
- “Change your notification settings so you only receive push alerts weekly.”
You should encourage participants to think aloud so you can understand the reasons for their behavior. Have a reliable AI transcription service on hand, so your team doesn’t have to wade through hours of voice notes to find the insights they need.
Top tip: AI can use onboarding flows, payment funnels, navigation hierarchies, and UI labels to automatically generate natural-language usability tasks that mimic how users actually behave. Use it to cross-reference scenarios created by your UX researchers – AI’s strength is in pattern recognition, so there may be a couple you might not have thought of!
5. Run the Tests and Analyze the Results
Traditionally, this is the most time-consuming part of usability testing for teams. Watching recordings manually, compiling spreadsheets, and tagging issue patterns by hand takes hours of your engineers’ time that could be used for something better.
The solution: let AI take care of the grunt work.
Rather than bore your QA team with hours of session recordings (and open yourself up to human error in the process), use an AI agent to watch through your tests, classify key behavior patterns and identify areas for actionable feedback.
Are we suggesting that you remove all human analysis from your usability testing processes? Absolutely not – your users are human, and there is a unique value to having your human engineers
6. Make Improvements Based on Test Analysis
You might want to optimize some features for one-handed use, clarify unclear buttons or icons, and make accessibility improvements to font sizing, for example.
AI-powered systems can suggest potential design changes or automatically generate summaries for engineering tickets, helping teams ship improvements more quickly. Prioritize these issues by impact against effort (high impact, low effort first!) for an efficient, impactful method of implementing improvements.
Remember: always run follow-up tests after changes are shipped. Usability testing should be iterative and drive continuous improvement – it’s not a once-and-done thing.
AI and Usability Testing for Mobile Apps: a Match Made in Heaven
One common thread you may have picked up across the steps above: AI testing tools allow you to enhance your mobile usability testing by:
- Supplementing human testing panels with insights from AI agents for faster, immediate fixes
- Taking care of menial tasks where value is low but potential for human error is high (tagging, watching session recordings, transcription)
- Suggesting key metrics, user journeys, and objectives for engineers to focus on, speeding up the usability testing process significantly
Time saved: significant. Usability testing: faster and more manageable to run. Results: more accurate and more easily actionable.
Tools like Momentic integrate these capabilities into a unified platform, making it easier for your team to adopt AI without overhauling your entire workflow. The result is faster iteration cycles, higher-quality releases, and more confident product decisions.
Momentic: AI-Enhanced Usability Testing for Mobile Apps
Momentic’s agentic AI features explore your app, find critical user flows, generate tests, and keep them up to date. You minimize human maintenance hours and maximize your ability to identify usability issues quickly.
You’ll also benefit from a range of mobile-specific features for both iOS and Android teams, including 1s emulator cold starts, 1s app installs, and seamless context switching between native and WebViews.
Our customers have saved over 40 engineering hours per month and expanded to 80% coverage in just two days.
Want to join them? Book a demo today to supercharge your mobile app testing process.
