Week 23: Looking back
(Mis)Adventures with Fancy Remote User Testing Tools
Holy guacamole, the team is very close to delivering the final prototype for hurricane preparedness.
This past week, we scheduled more than a dozen tests with our “everyday” citizen living in hurricane-prone areas in Florida, as well as family and professional caregivers of people with a medical condition that may require them to pre-register at a special evacuation shelter. Note to fellow user testers: always recruit more people than you think you can handle, drop-outs and no-shows are guaranteed.
It’s like wedding planning, but also … not like wedding planning.
We created a new testing protocol using the Think-Aloud method, and asked participants to interact with our tap-able prototype using InVision (sorry, Atomic) and a very promising-sounding tool called Lookback, which when downloaded to a user’s mobile, allows the researchers to see both the participant’s screen and a real-time video/audio feed of their reactions. Nifty right? WHEN IT WORKS. We have a sternly-worded letter in draft stage to the developers about some of the challenges we faced when getting our testers to onboard the tool. When it worked, it was brilliant. When it didn’t, we saw that our testers were frustrated … which more than likely carried through to their opinion/perception of our prototype.
Nevertheless, we persevered and overall impressions of our design were positive. We were also able to clearly identify which features were/weren’t useful to our users, leading to (hopefully) a less cluttered “Evacuation” interface. Behold, consolidation:
Meanwhile, our intrepid Technical Expert was hard at work building the backend for our key interactions and animations.
And our Design Expert was working through elegant information architecture and layout. We are streaming other work, too — our project website and some strategy-related documents (service model, future roadmap, and data flow model).
Next week promises to be even busier, but the finish line is in sight.
