This past Monday, after a four and half hour drive from Swansea to Liverpool, we found ourselves checking into a hotel about 50 feet from the Echo Arena where, interestingly, the Arctic Monkeys were playing a gig. As much as we would have loved to get tickets, we were too busy making the final checks for our latest round of user testing on View Driving Record.
Following on from the test we had conducted a fortnight before, these represented the ninth and tenth rounds of testing and we have learned a lot along the way. Over the past half a dozen sessions or so we have encountered fewer and fewer problems when logging in to the portal so, satisfied that element of the system cannot be improved any further, we decided to concentrate on the personal details, driving entitlements and penalty points.
We also have a number of other activities ongoing to try and add some quantitative data to all the invaluable qualitative information we have been gathering over the past few months. Chris recently blogged about the A/B testing we conducted and Wynne has talked about making use of Twitter to cast our insight net even further. For these A/B testing exercises the developers provided us with two very different versions of the screens to test the preferences customers had and therefore inform future design. The results of this exercise showed a slight preference for one of the versions but the best elements of both were combined to become the version we tested in Liverpool.
Changes included reducing the number of screens within View Driving Record (VDR) to one – with all the relevant information behind clearly marked tabs instead of separate buttons clicking through to new pages.
And it seems to have worked. Because aside from some minor issues, all of the customers in our last two tests were able to complete the tasks we set them with relative ease. Just a handful of the positive included:
"Fool proof"
"Anyone can do it"
As I’ve said repeatedly through these blogs, this isn’t the end of the process. The fact fewer defects are being discovered is great, but there are still numerous user stories focusing on the 'behind the scenes' technical aspects of VDR that will require feedback from users. Additionally, we have plans in place to test the system on a larger scale with live data and to run an assisted digital test whereby customers will obtain information from their record by contacting a telephone agent. For those who cannot transact online, our research has shown that the phone is the preferred channel. We have built the service so that our call centre agents can access VDR and view the service in exactly the same way as the customer would. It will be interesting to test how this works for customers who cannot see the screens and have to be talked through the process.
Future blogs will continue to show our progress as we go through the beta phase and ramp up to go live!