Check your hearing later — how we quickly built a reminder service to help people remember to check their hearing

Over 300,000 people have checked their hearing with RNID. But we think everyone should check their hearing. Sometimes people find the hearing check when they aren’t able to take it. They are busy, or in noisy places, or don’t have headphones. We wanted to help these people remember to check their hearing later.

Normally, we’d focus on user problems that our data tells us exists. It’s using that approach that we’ve been able to make it much easier for so many people to complete the check and find out whether they have hearing loss in just 3 minutes. But this problem was more speculative. We’d didn’t know for sure how many people would want to get a reminder, or that they’d take any notice if they did. So, we’d needed a more experimental approach to finding out.

Mobile first

We already use email to send people their results after they’ve taken the hearing check, and we considered using email for the reminders, but we all get so many emails every day that another could easily get lost. SMS, on the other hand, is much more immediate and we’re more used to responding to it.

The majority of people visiting our website use mobiles, so the hearing check was designed mobile-first. That means it’s easier to use on a phone than it is on a computer. So, if people got the reminder on their phones, they were just a click away from being able to take the hearing check. We hoped this would make it really easy for people. They could grab their headphones, click the link in the text message, and check their hearing.

Privacy, security and safety by design

We designed in privacy, security and safety from the very start. Only the data we needed for the reminder was collected, just a phone number, and we made sure not to connect it to any other data that could make an individual identifiable.

And to prevent other ways of potentially misusing our service we made it so that people could only submit UK phone numbers, only enter a number once, and when they had received a message from us, they wouldn’t receive another. All of these things were an essential part of how we designed the service in a responsible way.

We decided not to allow people to choose when to receive the reminder message. Even if it was only meant as a joke, we didn’t want people scheduling text messages from us to wake up their friends in the early hours. We already knew that over 30% of people take the check in the evening, so rather than letting people schedule their own time to receive the message, we’d send the message at 8pm. Setting the time ourselves not only meant we prevented some of the possibility of misuse, we could ship the work sooner as we didn’t have to build a scheduling system.

Learning fast

Making the whole thing as simple as possible meant we could build it quickly and start learning whether people really did want a reminder.

We were only interested in the metrics that mattered. We could have measured lots of things, but we knew that the data that would tell us what we really wanted to know was:

• how many people entered their phone number,
• how many people clicked the link, and
• how many people completed the hearing check.

From these numbers we’d be able to tell whether we were right about the problem of remembering to check your hearing later.

In the first three weeks, 86 people used the reminder. That’s about 1% of the people taking the check. And of those who received the reminder text messages, 27% went on to check their hearing. That’s more than we thought would use it. So, with what amounts to a few hours of work, we learned that some people do want to be reminded to check their hearing later, and that an SMS message is a pretty effective way of doing it.

This is the great thing about able to experiment with solving problems that we aren’t even sure exist for our users. Small, simple solutions help us get fast feedback from real users and make better decisions about where to take the hearing check next.

What next?

As we understand more about how people interact with the reminder service, we can think about how to use it to promote the hearing check in noisy places. Lots of people struggle to hear in places like train stations, which make them great places to tell people about checking their hearing but terrible places for people to actually check their hearing. With a reminder service we can encourage them to take the hearing check later.