Why you should get involved in user testing

I’m Tom Gayler, a designer and researcher working with Buckinghamshire council to improve the website. Our aim is to give residents more free time by making everything they do with the council as smooth as possible. My job is to make sure the website helps residents to easily find the right information and to use council services in a pain-free way. One of my roles for this project is to help with user testing. But what is user testing and why is it important?

What user testing involves

User testing aims to find out how well a website or piece of software works. It does this by asking the people who use it — the users — what they think.

In the case of the Buckinghamshire council website, the users are residents and visitors to the county. User testing can help the whole process of building and improving a website, from seeing what doesn’t work so well with the existing website, to finding new ways that the website could help a resident interact with the council. Sometimes user testing involves surveys or interactive tests which are done remotely and without direct contact between the researcher or resident. At other times it will be more like an interview where a researcher will ask the user to do tasks and answer questions.

How user testing helps make better websites

User testing is important because it helps us to understand:

• how people use services
• what they understand by the language the council uses
• their biggest frustrations when dealing with the council

Without user testing we couldn’t achieve our goals. User testing helps the council decide where to start on a project as well as measuring the success of any changes that are made. It also is important for residents to tell us what they think and how they feel about council services. User testing is a chance for you to speak and us to listen.

How you can get involved

User testing is most effective when as many people as possible get involved. That’s why Buckinghamshire council has set up a panel of user testers. If you’d like to contribute your voice to the hundreds already contributing please do so at the link below.
www.buckinghamshire.gov.uk/web-user-panel

You said, we did

Revenue and Benefits click testing

Thank you to more than 100 of you who took part in our click testing for pages related to Council Tax, Housing, Benefits for Housing and Business rates. This test helped us to see what the word benefits means to you and how to help people on low incomes find the support they need. We’re now making updates based on your responses.

Spot the difference

An example task from the click-testing with the heatmap results showing where participants clicked

Data from the click tests showing how successful participants were in finding content with their first click

Family Information Services (FIS) usability testing

As well as testing you can do yourself, you have been helping us with interviews via video calls. These help us understand not only what is happening when you use the Buckinghamshire website but why you make the decisions you do. It’s a great chance for you to share your opinion about how to make things better with the website.

Your input gave us the evidence and confidence to streamline the information and remove dozens of pages that were designed for professionals rather than parents, carers or young people with special needs. This means there are now fewer pages than before on the FIS, making it easier for users to find answers. We also got positive feedback from user testing on content we’d written in a plain, straightforward style. It gave us the evidence we needed to present complex information in a simple style anyone could understand.

You can see the updates on the live site: https://familyinfo.buckinghamshire.gov.uk/

Get involved by signing up:
www.buckinghamshire.gov.uk/web-user-panel

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Thanks to Eva Dyer and Jez Vibert (@jezvibert) for their help writing this blog.