Testing new improvements for a retirement income calculator

Interview & usability testing - Remote study from Perth, Australia

Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/Y5VBtBgswLQ

Background

I was engaged by Wellcom Melbourne to research and understand the usefulness and understandability of the new feature for the client’s superannuation calculator.

Role

• Research: manage research requests from the client + plan, conduct, analyse and report
• Ops: recruit and manage participants using Mailchimp and Askable
• Design: make 2 quick interactive prototypes using Figma

Approach

The interviews and usability testing were conducted remotely via Google Meet with 5 participants between the 1st and 8th of April 2021.

Research objectives:

• Test usefulness: see whether or not they find the proposed concept useful and relevant.
• Test understandability: see whether or not the target customers understand how the proposed concept works.

Insights

The study highlighted some main opportunities to improve the new concept:

• Overall, participants are relatively confident about the outcome of [subtopic] and most of them are not aware of [insights]. Therefore, knowing that [subtopic] would be helpful as it would educate them about how the real condition is, and prevent them from being overly confident.
• This research indicates that some participants find the new concept useful as they would [insights]. However, most of them need to [problem] to make sense of the data and eventually see the value out of it.
• Further, although the second prototype works better than the first one, some participants still didn’t have a clear idea about what the information is about when they first saw it.

Impact

• The insights and recommendations were well received by the client. We tweaked the concept based on the insights and decided to move forward to the next steps of the development as we’re now confident with the concept.
• I introduced the qualitative research approach to the organisation and inserted the highlight reels from research recordings throughout the report so that the clients can watch the clip if they’re interested to get to know further about a particular insight. “It was fascinating to watch the videos and pick up insights into other things that weren’t even the focus of our research.” — Client