My name is Jamie Trollope and although I have worked in the Customer Insight Team within DVLA for a number of years, I have only recently joined the exemplar project team as an Insight Manager. I’m extremely excited to be part of this digital transformation and bring to the table the customer view, helping to ensure the services we develop have customer opinion firmly taken into account. I’ll be using this blog to keep you updated on the customer insight part of the projects...from testing to surveys.
This month we have focussed on the latest round of user testing on the Integrated Enquiry Platform which will deliver a View My Driver Record service for customers to go online and view all the information that DVLA holds on their driver record from personal details to penalty points.
We want to get feedback from as many customers as possible, from diverse geographic areas, varied internet experience, age and ability. For the latest round of testing Kay John and I hopped on a flight to Glasgow having already spoken to customers in previous months in Swansea, Cardiff, Taunton and Birmingham.
This time, our participants ranged in age between 18 and 78 and were a mixture of full and provisional driving licence holders.
Participants in this test were very impressed with the design of the service. Using a combination of scenarios and dummy data to access the system, they navigated through the pages with relative ease. It’s a really invaluable experience to watch customers interact with your service, to see where their eye is drawn, which links appear prominent and how organic their journey is through to obtaining their desired outcome.
Since the previous test in Swansea, several notable additions and developments have been made, particularly around the wording used. References to ‘endorsements’ have been dropped in favour of ‘penalty points’ and the useful, but ambiguously titled ‘entitlements’ section, now displays a tab headed ‘what vehicles you can drive.’ Much simpler, much more understandable. This was reflected in the comments made by our participants in Glasgow;
There was nothing there in terms of wording that confused me.
All of the participants were able to complete the scenarios and find the required information and all also confirmed it would be a useful system they would access themselves once live, particularly to monitor penalty points and to keep up to date with entitlement changes were the rules to change.
If anybody was remotely competent, it’s a superb source of information.
There are still improvements that can made to the service including the order in which driving entitlements are displayed and the length of time penalty points remain on the licence.
The great thing about this approach is that Kay and I are very quickly able to provide the development team with these findings and demonstrate through some of the footage exactly where customers were having difficulty. This feedback can be factored in to the next sprint through user stories, ready for us to test again. This iterative testing process is truly agile and delivers real benefits to the project whilst simultaneously ensuring that the service is built around our customers.
Pulling together the feedback, preparing the footage and writing this blog gives us just enough time to pack our bags and hop in the car for the next test – Plymouth is just a few days away!
I’d be interested to know if you are developing a service and what user testing you are doing? Have you encountered any problems in your testing and if so how did you overcome them?
2 comments
Comment by John posted on
That looks like a good service you're introducting.
It's always good to know what information a company holds about you.
Comment by Simon posted on
I think that is brilliant and covers one thing close to me heart, resolving the ridiculous jargon we use and replacing it with something that people can understand.