Keeping up with the COVID-19 situation is a challenge. As the state-of-play changes on an hourly basis and new restrictions keep coming in, there is no time for businesses to adjust and spend the time they would normally have to develop the services their users need.
Following the closure of their stores on Tuesday, B&Q transitioned from business as usual to only providing a click&collect/ drive through service in just two days. Similarly, the government has managed to develop their Coronavirus job retention scheme in less than a week.
While the speed of these development is very impressive, it is still vitally important that the online processes that accompany them are user friendly. Get it wrong the first time and you are likely to be inundated with complaints and issues from customers, causing more headaches in the long run.
The good thing is, it is very easy to make sure an online service works for your users, and that is by asking them.
And it doesn’t need to take up lots of time.
Conducting all the research remotely means there is minimal set up. With a laptop and Zoom conferencing a research session can be good to go within minutes. Once the asset to be tested has been developed, you can get enough user feedback from only 3-4 testers to decide if it is good to go, meaning we could have the research completed the same day.
One of the benefits of social distancing and the governments new ‘stay at home’ restrictions is there are a lot of potential testers now available at a moment’s notice. As work and social schedules have emptied, recruitment for remote UX research has never been so easy!
To ensure research gets turned into action quickly, all remote testing can be live streamed to a destination of choice. This means digital teams can all watch the research as it happens (always the best thing to do anyway!). Then using a combination of live chat and video conferencing debriefs the team can make decisions about how to improve the digital service instantly, even updating it as you go along.
Designing new digital services is always stressful, especially when turnaround times are ridiculously tight. Making sure these services are effective, however, is still key and testing with users is the best way to do this.
Read more: UX will continue in a self-isolated world, What is the pupose of usability testing