3.2 Application itself

This is of course the main focus of your work. Regardless if your software is a web application or there are desktop applications available for multiple platforms such as free software distributions, Mac OS and Windows – you should test all of these if possible. With users of that specific operating system as participants you can see how people familiar with different interaction concepts handle your application. More and more people today have smartphones and need the software usable on that – be it for Android, iOS, webOS, MeeGo, Windows Phone 7 or BlackBerry. Adjusting the web interface is the easiest route as there likely are no capacities for development of dedicated applications. If you use open protocols you might be able to recommend 3rd party software (we do that for Nextcloud and mobile WebDAV clients). In that case you need to test how it works and if there are multiple clients only recommend one – the best one. Testing of basic functionality can be done beforehand. For example a web interface can be viewed in different browsers on the cross-browser testing site Browserling. As important as the usability of the application itself is, always note that when the website and installation is not easy enough, people will never even come that far.