We migrated our website to a new platform (Placecube) and asked ourselves the question: how can we make sure our website is just as good (if not better) on the new platform?
The most obvious way was for us to do some user testing on our old site to find out:
· how people search and/or navigate
· how long it takes people to reach information or perform a task
· how difficult or easy they find it
· whether they completed the tasks or not
Now we’re preparing to repeat the same user tests to prove that the user journeys are at least as good on our new site — if not much better!
Start at the very beginning
We had to work out where to start. We knew we’d be doing all our testing remotely, so we did a bit of research to find out what others have been doing.
Unsurprisingly, so many people had sprung into action over lockdowns to continue user testing (thanks
for asking the question on Twitter and Slack). This meant we had quite a few tried and tested methods to base our own testing on:
· user research and COVID-19 tools and tips on GOV.UK blog
· a user testing report Neil had created following testing he’d done on a Tenants Portal back at Oxford
· testing over the phone done by our Service Design team
Missing user testing
We used to do lots of user testing and research; spending time in Dorset libraries, leisure centres and even wedding fairs over the years to find out what and how people navigate through certain tasks while we observed and took notes to improve navigation, language and layout among other things.
Trouble is, other things have kind of got in the way lately, like:
· moving to a new web platform in 2018
· local government reorganisation (LGR) when we became Dorset Council in 2019
· 2020 well, Covid
It was so good to get back to it. So here are our top tips for anyone else who wants to get back to user testing.
Work out your top 10 services
We used Google Analytics to find our top 10 services and it was really interesting to see how many Covid-influenced tasks had popped up into our usual list. Page views for things like walking routes and country parks had spiked, whereas our usually popular leisure centres had taken a dive. All to be expected considering closed businesses and a push to socialise outdoors.
Create the tasks for the user testers
We looked at previous user testing we’d done during the last migration and created tasks around our top 10 services, things like:
· you have a child at a school in Dorset and want to book a holiday in July. Find out what date the schools break up
· check which bins are being collected this week at your address. Tell me the day when you find it
Appeal for user testers
We sent out 2 messages to appeal for user testers; one on our weekly Dorset Council newsletter and another on our Facebook page, with a super short MS Form to capture details.
We got 157 responses!
We were so chuffed as it showed us that people were really interested in helping us improve our website.
Book your user testing slots (and sort a fitting reward for your trusty volunteers)
We sent out another form to 24 of our volunteers with different 45 minute slots covering times during the day and evening. We decided to send user testers a £10 high street voucher afterwards as a thank you for taking part.
Some things we didn’t think of:
· some people changed their mind and wanted to opt out, so we made a mental note to add that option in our next round
· a couple of people emailed the default address asking if their time slot could be confirmed as soon as possible as they couldn’t hold the slot open indefinitely
· so many people from our list entered time slots that we ended up with about 30 people per time slot in some cases! We decided we should split our list up next time so that we have a smaller selection to choose from
Think about how you’re going to do the actual testing remotely
This one took some dedicated concentration.
As a Microsoft-using council, we were keen to hold our user testing interviews over Teams so that we could screen share and observe what our testers were doing at the same time as talking us through their decisions. But we knew that wouldn’t work for everyone… and we were right!
We adapted whenever we had to, and found that:
· most people used Teams
· some people preferred Zoom
· others had no camera or microphone so did the testing over the phone with us, telling us why they were choosing certain links and we followed by navigating in the same way on our laptop
Surprisingly, we had unexpected success from the phone only session as our lovely user was reading out every link he clicked. This alerted us to the fact that there were at least 2 unnecessary steps in a certain journey– steps that we may not have noticed if we’d simply been watching the screen.
We used MS Forms again to create our user testing task sheet. This was a really important form as we used it for every session with our volunteers to log how they navigated for each task. We logged:
· the user’s name
· which task we were doing
· whether they completed or abandoned the task
· if they thought they’d completed the task successfully or not
· how long the task took
· how difficult the user found the task
· notes on the whole session
Learn and hone as you go along
We made time to meet most days during our user testing project; to improve our process as well as to compare notes.
We learnt to ask more at the outset about how our testers would prefer to do the user testing. This meant we were able to book the right type of meeting at the beginning.
We kept identifying ways of improving what we logged. We’ve now added these extra fields to our form:
· ‘device used’; there were some users who had issues with different devices that we hadn’t been aware of
· how people moved around our site, for example:
o popular services
o navigated
o used search box
Both these things helped us work out the best way to lay out information on a page.
User testing forever
This is just the start. We want to use our experience to inform future user testing. We absolutely loved speaking to our users — real, wonderful residents of Dorset. You cannot beat it.
We’re now creating our own User Testing Playbook at Dorset Council. We know our Service Designers are also big fans of user testing and it would be useful to have a set guidance for everyone to follow.
Not an advert
We used these products to do our user testing:
· MS Forms — as a kind of customer relationship management tool when logging task results
· Onedrive to collaborate on EVERYTHING — was actually really useful
· Teams for most of our user testing sessions
· Zoom for users who preferred it
· Excel — to analyse the user testing results
· good old-fashioned snail mail to get our vouchers out to the testers
Happy remote testing!
Susannah Crossland and Claire Ryan-East
