Category Archives: user experience
User testing approach and the customer buying process
I’ve been working on the testing plan for a large personal finance company.
The aim of testing is to understand customer behaviour during the purchase process and how we can help motivate customers through the journey. The purchase journey can be broken into a number of stages.
Recognition of a problem or a need
Product Search
Product Evaluation
Purchase
Expectation and use
As part of the customer research I’m using an online survey to gather customer requirements at key stages in the process. A secondary aim is to understand what devices customers are using and how they use devices differently. This should help inform the longer term strategic development of the site.
As well as the online questionnaire I’m running some face to face user testing. This consists of in depth customer interviews which inform the affinity or a behaviour model. [We can then assign features and functionally to ensure that customer needs are support by the product. ]
Usability testing the current web and responsive offer will highlight what is working and what’s not working so well.
Running the two sessions will give good insight into the strategic development of the product whilst also help make immediate improvements to the product.
Do customers really know what they want?
Sometime customers think they know what they want, but the reality can be very different.
http://gerrymcgovern.newsweaver.ie/lbziav8x76118oi9rbfqfq?email=true
The worst way to design a website is to have five smart people in a room drinking lattes. The longer you leave them in the room the worse the design becomes. The next worst way is to have 15 customers in a room drinking lattes. What people say they do and what they actually do are rarely the same thing.
Error rates on forms
Forms can be very tricky to get right, and we aim to monitor the success rate on our forms, some of which do have high error rates. It is useful to get an idea of a base level, its’ a helpful gauge when looking to optimise.
Jane Frost, Director, of the Individuals Customer Directorate at HM Revenue & Customs
‘Reality Check: What Your Customers Will Actually Do’
Customer-focused design based on user testing for forms, and all communications, is essential to reduce error rates, she said, although councils should be realistic: “With forms, there is a 5% error rate when you just ask people for their name, and with anything involving a calculation it is over 50%. This suggests that a form that is 10 questions long, even with the simplest questions, will have a base error rate of 25%.
http://www.communities.idea.gov.uk/c/643937/blog/blog-display.do?id=7948311