March Update: User Testing
If there’s one thing about working with children and digital products, it’s that children are the most unpredictable user groups out there. They’re honest, playful and have a very short attention span. Their intuition drives them, and they often shift focus quickly. Building a learning tool thats both engaging and education for 7 to 15 year olds isn’t as easy as you might think!
That’s why it’s critical that the BANKI team gets as close as possible to the target audience and learn about what they like and dislike about the product.
Earlier this month we organised a user testing day at Stockholm International School. The school has students from over 60 countries which gives a unique insight into our future user base. The vast majority of students are multilingual and multicultural, having already experienced living in different countries. This makes them highly adaptable, communicative and open-minded to testing new products. Just what we needed.
We held three 30 minute user testing workshops with different classes. The team briefly introduced themselves and we got straight into understanding what the children knew about money, prices and economy. Questions such as ‘who has a debit card?’, ‘who gets a monthly allowance?’ and ‘who has a mobile phone?’ were asked to get the children to participate in an open discussion. This gave us a good understanding of how to engage with the class going forward.
Next we got straight into a BANKI quiz. As phones are not used in the classroom, we built out a quiz using the Kahoot platform and the children we able to access this in small groups on the schools iPads. The quiz had the same look and feel of the BANKI app which allowed us to gage whether or not it was fun to play.
The team distributed a sheet of paper and asked the class to think of an idea which they’d like to see in the app. This method is similar to Crazy 8’s in a typical design sprint. This was to spark their imagination and to get an understanding of any future features we should consider.
Here are some of the insights we picked up:
1) Smart phone usage is a delicate subject. We realised not all children had received a phone from their parents and so we need to consider what the best device to reach all children. We loved that the school encourages learning via Kahoot and so there might be some interesting connectivity we can do there later on.
2) Cash is still relevant. From following the cashless society news closely, we assumed that cash was less used, especially in younger audiences. However this is not the case and a large amount of your students said they’re still receiving cash from their parents
3) We realised also some of our content wasn’t best matched to some of the children, We’ll go away and improve how the questions are structured and the level of complexity. Overall we feel like the quiz was a great way to engage the students in our product.
4) The monsters were a big hit. We had great feedback about Savey & Spendster and a lot of the children said they related to one or the other. We want to make sure there is a balance between them and how the child perceives their own behaviour, but it was great to see that the children took an interest to them.
Overall the user testing workshops was an amazing experience for the team and the feedback we received was very positive. We’ll now work on refining some of the points above for our early access coming very soon.
If you haven’t already signed up for our waiting list, to be the first to get your hands on the BANKI app this month… make sure you do!
