Getting usability done: our shift from traditional to RITE testing

What does it mean to test live and design between tests to approach a (almost) perfect user experience.

Towards the end of 2022, our small Research Team was quietly toasting our early successes. After months of weaving UX research into our user-flow reviews, the business, design, and tech teams were finally tuned into the real-world issues users faced — and, as a result, we were solving them. More value for everyone, yay!

Our next challenge? Turning this awareness into a well-oiled machine.

If part of user-centered design is spotting existing issues, another vital practice is preventing them from happening in the first place. Relying solely on customer care requests or bursts of innovative brilliance would only deepen our design debt.

To catch usability errors in emerging digital services, it became clear that our intervention needed to be systematic and happen before projects solidified their foundations.

Yet, squeezing a rigorous investigation into a far-from-linear existing process was easier said than done.

This article will resume why the RITE testing methodology was, for us, a persistent choice in 2023.

Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE)

The opportunity to embrace RITE testing came when we urgently needed to fix a subscription funnel due to new legal rules. Usability errors could have hit us hard.

Integrations need to roll out in just two weeks!

Said Law.

That was when RITE testing not only convinced us but emerged as our superhero:

• we needed to be more flexible and to engage constantly decision-makers. Technical hiccups, regulatory changes, and business reassessments are just some of the flexibility points during product development.
• we needed to be faster but without compromising result solidity. RITE testing did that by reducing the number of tests needed for a concrete intervention (from 5–8 observations to just 1) and obtaining a more solid validation, iteration after iteration. Also, the final solution is the one that ends the sessions by achieving a satisfying task success rate.

In contrast to traditional usability tests (which involve a single session batch), time and costs were optimized, with more opportunities to experiment and ensure we not only addressed key observed issues but also demonstrated to have solved them before release.

What worked like magic

After the first occasion, we immediately noticed that some advantages were as evident as powerful.

Tested solutions lead to easier decisions

Iterating test sessions with high-fidelity prototypes allowed us to observe and successfully resolve issues with precision. This naturally kept stakeholders more engaged, accelerated approval timelines, and enhanced the team design’s decision autonomy.

Observing your product as used in the real world is a motivation booster

The more witnesses, the easier it is to convey that a problem is indeed a problem, especially when it comes from the real world. Avoiding the frustration of seeing external stakeholders procrastinate on easily addressable errors and witnessing real problems being solved directly due to our efforts proved to be a highly effective team-building and motivation strategy.

Repeat after me: the more you show user tests the more UX culture can grow!

We recorded every user test session and allowed everyone in the company to take a seat in the observation room. Inviting the entire product team proved to be a great idea: showing how usability affects the product experience is the best way to explain its impact. After a few tests, the value of doing research was clear to everyone.

Lessons learned along the way

Given the benefits of this methodology, we’ve decided to adopt it continuously. This has allowed us to experiment multiple times and learn some valuable best practices:

- Keeping it simple will lead to a clearer decision-making process

Bringing decisions into a test field means seeking as much clarity as possible. You can facilitate this by making choices early on and focusing your research goals on priority topics. For instance, test no more than two scenarios per session.

- Prepare templates and spend less time on documentation during the process

No lengthy presentations: we usually annotate findings directly on the Figma file, session after session. For the debrief, we usually share a collaborative sheet with the product team presenting the top 5 key points that were solved or still need further discussion. Only at the end of the project, we archive a mini-report with details and open points that will be useful to revisit in the future. This way, time is saved, and no key information is lost.

In conclusion

This story began with the mission of preventing friction in our users’ flows. But it brought us much more: we managed to introduce the product team to a proven methodology — in the UX community-, and this revealed to be especially suitable for the complexities of an agile environment like ours.

In the end, our user testing process changed and became simpler. RITE testing marked a pivotal moment in how we approach usability within the Telepass Digital team. Thanks to the flexibility and speed achieved, we seamlessly included users in the design process without compromise.

If you’re contemplating adopting it for your product, check out the Figma template prepared by my colleagues Carolina Modica and Nicola Vagniluca.

Have you already tried this methodology? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments!

This article was written by Elena Parozzi, UX Research Lead, and edited by Marta Milasi, UX Content Lead at Telepass. Interested in joining our team? Check out our open roles!