The Gateway to a Better Experience - NHS Inform User Testing
'Digirati more than exceeded our expectations. From quote to outputs of the work, they were extremely thorough and professional in their approach. They met our timescales and listened to our requirements, making appropriate suggestions based on their own expertise in the field. Highly recommended.'
Lynne Huckerby, Head of Health Information Services, NHS 24
Overview
Sector: Public Health
Project Name: NHS Inform UAT
Audience: Entire Scottish population.
Challenge: To perform a usability study with the aim of identifying future site improvements.
Key deliverables
• Several key usability issues uncovered in under 10 days
• Actionable recommendations presented to NHS stakeholders
• Findings documented with show reel, report and presentation slides
• Recruitment costs: 9 coffees, 2 teas and 4 cakes, 1 caramel wafer (high cost due to Starbucks location)
Key areas of interest
• User testing
• Usability review
• Guerrilla User testing
URL: http://www.nhsinform.co.uk
Background
The Scottish NHS awarded Digirati with the contract to run UAT (User testing) of the NHS Inform website. The site having been live for six months was at a suitable point at which to run user testing to direct the next phase of development identifying where best to focus efforts.
The primary aim for the testing was to identify usability problems whilst at the same time answer a series of opinion based questions related to brand and content. In consultation with the team responsible for site delivery and ongoing maintenance Digirati rapidly designed a test script that would capture the required information, an approach was designed combining two practices.
Testing approach and design
The first component was a series of observational tasks to gain insight into how the participant went about discovering content available on the site. Screen capture software recorded the participant's interactions with the live website whilst a webcam captured the all import sound bites and facial expressions that further illustrate personal reaction to particular scenarios.
Opinion was captured through a series of questions each assigned with a unipolar 5 point scale designed to prompt the respondent to think of the presence or absence of qualities and attributes. These questions allowed subsequent analysis to ascertain the participant's opinion regarding branding, look and feel and quality of content.
Guerrilla user testing - for the price of a coffee
To recruit the audience describe as the 'entire population' could have been an expensive time consuming task, however. Using the guerrilla approach for user testing resulted in the collection of a large sample of data from a stream of participants from the general population within a short time frame.
Quickly it became apparent that all participants struggled with a consistent set of features and a particular set of labels and terms used to categories some content. Some of the observations were expected, other as always proved surprising. This confirms that prior knowledge will successfully get you only so far. Prior knowledge only really applies in context and context is vital in successfully communicating and commercially transacting with your audience.
Results
A multi format show reel highlighting key findings form the gorilla testing sessions was accompanied by a detailed report both of which were presented to the team at their monthly project board meeting. As a result the following actionable items resulted.
• Detailed user stories that enriched the personas used to inform design decisions.
• Observed user behavior based recommendations to improve the presentation of information resulting from the use of the free text search field.
• Confirmation that the content published by NHS Inform was considered high quality, informative and most importantly trusted by users.
• Highlighted that some terms used by NHS Inform were not best suited to promote certain classifications of content.
• Discovered that some key navigational elements were either missed or disregarded by participants because of their similarity to online advertisements.
