The benefits of doing face-to-face user research
What I learned from doing in-person user research visits for our new service
When I first started working at RNID, I was asked to help design our new face-to-face service. The service lets deaf people, and people who have hearing loss or tinnitus, get easy access to non-judgmental information and support locally to help them:
- maintain their hearing aids
- improve their hearing
- get their hearing checked
- connect with people who share their experiences.
I’d spent my whole career working on digital services, so I was excited by the idea of working on a service that wasn’t online. RNID may be a digital first charity, but that doesn’t mean that we’re digital only. We know that there are some people who will never use our digital services because they lack digital skills or internet access, or because they just don’t want to.
There was just one problem: COVID restrictions meant that I couldn’t do any face-to-face user research for our face-to-face service.
I wasn’t that worried initially. I had only started getting involved in user research during lockdown, so I was used to doing remote research. I interviewed the staff and volunteers who ran our in-person hearing aid support sessions before COVID on Teams or Zoom. I also spoke to potential service users on Zoom about how they use face-to-face services and what challenges they face with their hearing. I felt fairly confident about what we’d learned and the service we had designed.
What I learned from the pilot
When our face-to-face services started to reopen this spring after COVID restrictions were lifted, we chose a few of them to be pilot locations for our new service. I got the opportunity to go to Northern Ireland for a few days to visit 2 of our pilot locations, observe how the services were run, and chat with staff, volunteers and users about their experiences.
It was the most useful thing I’ve done throughout the whole project — and here’s why:
I understood the physical context of the service
Volunteers and staff had explained what the venues that we used were like, but there’s nothing like standing in the space where your service is being delivered. I could see how big the space was, how it was set up and how easy it was to get to. I didn’t realise how much I’d been missing that context until I was there.
I spoke to actual service users
We used a recruitment agency to recruit user research participants in the earlier phases of the project. We had asked them to find people who reported having low to moderate digital skills.
Many of the people that we spoke to during our research said they prefer to receive information online rather than in print. However, when I spoke to the people who were using our services at our pilot locations, they told me the opposite. Many of them rarely or never went online.
While the participants the agency recruited self-reported having low digital skills, they were still able to log into Zoom to do the interview, complete an online consent form, and receive a summary of our research through email. They had a basic level of digital confidence that many of the people who use our face-to-face services don’t. It helped me realise that we need to prioritise printed information over online information at our service.
I observed things that I never could have learned through interviews
I never would have realised that we needed to display our printed information more prominently if I hadn’t been able to watch people walk past it without realising it was there. I also wouldn’t have been able to hear how loud it got in the waiting area and see how people sometimes struggled to hear what our volunteers were saying because of the noise. It was so useful to be able to watch what people do instead of relying on what they say they do.
I’m back to working remotely from the spare room in my flat, but I can’t wait to get back out to visit more of our services. Zoom may have kept us going through COVID lockdowns, but when it comes to designing a face-to-face service, there’s no substitute for just being there.
