Usability testing is a crucial step in designing any product or application. For our team developing Clear Path , designing the usability tests was a very important part of the process. Since our Jira app was a new application being developed from scratch, there is even more of a need to understand the user experience and improvements that can be made based on user feedback. Before conducting the tests, designing the usability test is equally important to ensure you are receiving the information that would help make your product better.

When first designing our usability test script, there was discussion about whether to use a usability test or user acceptance test (UAT). Although these types of tests are used interchangeably, they have differences that need to be considered. Being a new app, it was a question for our team on whether to do usability testing or user acceptance testing. So, what is the difference between these two types of tests?

You have two choices for building the user interface for your Forge app – the UI kit, and custom UI. The UI kit allows you to create a straightforward UI using a set of Atlassian-supplied components, put together using relatively simple code. Custom UI gives you more room to use Atlassian-supplied and third-party hooks, components and such, while also allowing you to employ more complex HTML, CSS, static resources (such as images) and source code, all of which can be hosted in Atlassian’s cloud with custom UI but not the UI kit. Both types of UI involve writing code in a React-like pattern, which makes sense in that various components available from Atlassian are based on React.

In a prior installment of this blog [1], we discussed getting your Forge app up and running in a "Hello, World!" way on a test Atlassian instance. Now, perhaps your company has an Atlassian instance that employees use daily, and you'd like to test your Forge app in the real world by installing it on that instance. Another scenario is that you’re now ready to have customers for your app, so you need to distribute it to them.

Forge is Atlassian’s next-generation framework for building apps that integrate with Confluence, Jira, or Jira Service Management. Forge provides Web UI elements, APIs and deployment environments that enable developers to create fully-featured apps within Atlassian’s cloud infrastructure through the use of JavaScript, HTML, CSS and other Web technologies. Forge apps can be distributed via the Atlassian Marketplace as software to which any Atlassian Cloud customer can subscribe.