user testing - intelligentenvironments.com testing p 5 guerilla testing is the cheapest and easiest...

An Intelligent Environments White Paper

Digital Financial Solutions

User Testing 2015



User Testing P 3

All products should be tested by the people that will use them, regardless of whether that is your clients’ customers or the general public. You can be the best designer in the world, or think you know your users inside out, but you still won’t know how your users will behave until you observe them using your product.

User testing is the process of evaluating how your product performs for your users. This enables you to spot problems throughout the development process. There are several types of user testing you can do at various stages of development; this paper will discuss three in details –Guerilla testing, Remote testing, and Expert Reviews –and analyse their effectiveness.

User testing doesn’t have to be expensive. While you can spend a lot of money on laboratory facilities and third party expertise, to test your product and get a lot of valuable insight, usability problems can also be uncovered in a much less formal environment, using cost-effective and simple techniques.

The selection of users is important to get right, as it gives you a more valuable output. They should be closely matched to your real target audience – use any data that you have on your users to determine this. Also consider those that you wish to aim the product towards in future. Think beyond simple metrics like age and gender, and also include factors like technical competence, familiarity with certain software, or hobbies. Sometimes you may want a more specific target audience of testers, depending on what you want to test, other times you will have a much broader range of testers.

For more information please contact [email protected]

“You’re almost always wrong about your users”

Manik Rathee User Experience Engineer, Google


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Guerilla Testing

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“ The word Guerilla in this context describes the ‘in the wild’ style of testing, meaning that it can be held anywhere.


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Guerilla testing is the cheapest and easiest style of testing to set up. The word Guerilla in this context describes the ‘in the wild’ style of testing, meaning that it can be held anywhere. Common places for this type of testing are coffee shops, offices and university campuses.

Participants are normally the general public, colleagues, or friends and family. You normally only need a laptop, or device, and a pre-prepared list of things you want to test. It usually takes from 5 – 15 mins to quickly gauge opinion on a particular aspect of your product. You may also choose to record the sessions (with permission from the person you are testing).

This form of testing is quick and inexpensive. The result is a list of common usability problems that you can immediately iterate the design with, and that suits an agile development process. It’s advisable for someone other than the designer to carry out this testing, to reduce any confirmation bias and give a fresh perspective.

Testing of early versions of

release

Testing of mockups/prototypes

Testing of final release

Brief Design Development & Q&A

Release

User testing should happen at every stage of development


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“ As well as having a broad reach, remote testing through a crowdsource provider is relatively cheap compared with outsourcing the testing.

Remote/Crowdsourcing testing


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In order to get a broader spectrum of participants you might consider using people from a wide geographical area, and carrying out testing remotely via software such as Skype. The easiest way to carry this out is through crowdsourcing methods. Crowdsourcing, in this context, uses a large community of users to test your product. There are many services which provide such a solution and have a wide network of testers, for example usertesting.com and UsabilityHub. You can simply upload a design or prototype and get fast feedback, usually in the form of a heatmap, or recording of a test session.

A global community means that you have a much more diverse set of testers to choose from. You can usually narrow down your audience by specifying simple metrics such as age, location, and language. Some services will also allow you to define more specific requirements.

As well as having a broad reach, remote testing through a crowdsource provider is relatively cheap compared with outsourcing the testing. It’s also easy and quick to set up, and results normally start to appear within a few hours. You will need to leave some time to analyse the results and identify the common usability problems, so that you can iterate your design.


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Case Study: Account improvementsIn Interact® our digital banking platform, we recently made some layout changes to the way we present information for Vehicle Finance accounts. We utilise crowdsourcing to test our designs regularly and iterate them until we had something we were comfortable with and were confident would work well for our customers.

One of the methods we utilised was to use a series of dynamic cards that pointed to various ancillary information and tools around Vehicle Finance, such as viewing your payment plan or carrying out a check on your PCP mileage. We wanted to test a couple of visual design options, one using text and iconography and the other using text and photography.

In order to test this we carried out two ‘click tests’. A click test is a static screen that can be shown to a group of users (in this case crowdsourced), who are then asked to click to choose a certain area. The question is most often framed ‘Where would you click to...’. In this case we asked our users to click the place where they wiould expect to make a transfer. Doing this across several variations with different groups of users allowed us to have a comparison. In this case there was a significant difference in accuracy, with the iconography performing much better than the photography.

Another series of tests we did was around primary actions on account screens. We wanted to see if users preferred a clear, up front, primary option, or if a cleaner layout suited them better. A simple preference test, asking users to choose the one they thought more understandable, gave us some guidance. Click tests can highlight a design’s effectiveness

A preference test shows the same group of users several options to choose from, with a question to guide them – e.g. “Which is more understandable”. The order of the options is randomised so as to not bias the results. Added to some additional click testing and guerrilla tests we had a fairly good indication what worked best for our users.

A preference test gives you an idea of a user’s choice


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Expert Testing

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“ The word Guerilla in this context describes the ‘in the wild’ style of testing, meaning that it can be held anywhere.


P 10User Testing

There are a variety of third parties who provide user testing as a service. The usual process includes:

An evaluation of your current product, in order to generate test cases

Recruitment of test participants using a defined set of criterias

Laboratory based testing with a moderator, and a set of observers in another room

watching the testing (usually via monitors and/or one-way glass)

Analysis and reporting of the results by way of a report, presentation, or workshop.

Major problems are discussed and solutions advised

Using external experts to analyse your site gives you the advantage of an unbiased expert review and solid recommendations. It is, however, a more expensive user testing option, and is best done on a near finished product in the final stages of development. Observing people using your product gives you an invaluable insight into what users are thinking when they use it.

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User Testing

Conclusion User testing is vital if you want to know whether your design enables the best use of your product by your target audience. Without it, you are designing blind and will only find out when it’s too late. Testing at regular intervals throughout the process will enable you to reduce the risk of usability problems in your final product and will give you the most customer insight.

Use a combination of remote and guerrilla testing at early stages, in order to iterate design quickly and avoid going down the wrong path. Once you have a near complete product you should also consider some expert third party testing, to fully analyse your product as a whole and test it with your defined audience.


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About the Author

Adrian Westlake

UX Design Team Lead, Intelligent Environments

Adrian has driven the user experience for Intelligent Environments and their clients since 2013. He has a deep passion for making technology more accessible to everyone through intuitive user experiences, and has previously worked on UI projects for leading digital marketing companies, with clients including work for MyVoucherCodes.co.uk, Panasonic, Coca Cola, and Unilever.

Adrian leads the Design Studio and manages the user testing process at Intelligent Environments, owning the overall user experience for Interact® and working with their clients to ensure that experience is best customised for their users.

About Intelligent EnvironmentsIntelligent Environments is an international provider of innovative financial services technology. Our mission is to enable our clients to deliver a simple, secure and effortless digital customer experience.

We do this through Interact®, our digital financial services platform, which enables secure customer acquisition, onboarding, engagement, transactions and servicing across any digital channel and device. Today these are predominantly focused on smartphones, PCs and tablets. However Interact® will support other devices, if and when they become mainstream.

We provide a more viable option to internally developed technology, enabling our clients with a fast route to market whilst providing the expertise to manage the complexity of multiple channels, devices and operating systems. Interact® is a continuously evolving digital customer engagement platform that ensures our clients keep pace with the fast moving digital landscape.

We are immensely proud of our achievements, in relation to our innovation, our thought leadership, our industrywide recognition, our demonstrable product differentiation, the diversity of our client base, and the calibre of our partners.

For many years we have been the digital heart of a diverse range of financial services providers including Generali Wealth Management, HRG, Ikano Retail Finance, Lloyds Banking Group, MotoNovo Finance, Think Money Group and Toyota Financial Services.

If you’d like to hear more please contact Adrian Westlake

+44 (0)20 8614 9888 [email protected]

Kingston Upon ThamesRiverview House20 Old Bridge StreetKingston upon ThamesSurrey

KT1 4BU

+44 (0) 20 8614 9800

Belfast, Northern IrelandSuite 1B Ground FloorConcourse Building 1Northern Ireland Science ParkQueens RoadBelfastNorthern Ireland

BT3 9DT

+44 (0) 2890 785 795

Digital Financial Solutions

[email protected]

user testing - intelligentenvironments.com testing p 5 guerilla testing is the cheapest and easiest...

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