Article
Using UX testing to empower teams and improve conversion
How I used customer testing to bring design thinking into cross-functional teams, uncover problems quickly and get everyone closer to the customer.
When I joined CarFinance 247 as Head of User Experience & Design, I joined a business full of brilliant, passionate people who were great at what they did.
One of my main goals was to instil design thinking within those teams whilst building a first-class UX team and structure around them.
That takes time. Recruiting people is hard... maybe not hard but time consuming. No wait, actually it is hard.
But I didn't need to wait for a design team to start changing how people thought about customers.
In my experience people are happier when given a problem to solve rather than told how to solve the problem.
Long gone, well hopefully they are, are the days of design handing over a ‘finished’ set of files for developers to build from.
Working in cross-functional teams you work quicker, collaboratively. The perceived role of design has changed from the person sat in the corner bashing out designs, potentially getting stroppy if anyone questions a decision they've made, to a more collaborative type of animal.
Design is about solving problems. In my experience people are happier, more engaged and produce better work when given a problem to solve rather than being told how to solve the problem.
This is where user experience testing can be so powerful.
It’s the easiest way to bring design thinking to a cross-functional team.
CarFinance 247 moves fast. We had an amazing team of engineers, data scientists, product owners and others, and we were always releasing improvements.
Often in companies designers can't be involved in everything, but teams still need to release value.
So how can you know how to improve your product or features with minimal design guidance?
Run a user experience testing session and let engineers, product owners and stakeholders see and understand the problems they need to fix.
In all the years I've been working I've never heard anyone say observing a UX testing session was a waste of time. Ever.
The prospect of sitting through a UX testing session isn't necessarily something that fills engineers with joy.
But I've never heard anyone come out of one saying it was a waste of time.
It acts as a lightbulb moment and allows people who aren't designers to ideate solutions to the problems they've just seen.
Some of those ideas may need shaping by someone more focused on the user, but it gets you a lot closer to a valuable, user-focused solution.
It is one of the easiest ways I've found to bring design thinking to people who aren't used to user-centred design.
CarFinance 247's first user experience testing session
The impact UX testing can have was demonstrated when we ran our first full day of sessions.
It broke down like this:
- We saw five people individually for an hour each, all of whom were looking for car finance
- They used their mobile phone online daily for things like shopping and Facebook
- We had a chat about their situation and thoughts around cars and finance
- They applied for car finance on our website
- They received a call from one of our advisors
- We wrapped up, paid them £50 and they were free to go
- The team broke down their findings
This was our first full UX testing day, so I deliberately didn't focus on anything in particular. I just wanted us to observe people going through the process.
What we learnt
To say this was eye-opening for the team is an understatement.
We saw people hit brick walls and not know what to do. We saw people tap something and get a result they weren't expecting. We found the answer to one technical bug we'd been struggling with and discovered another we didn't know we had.
For an organisation that hadn't been exposed to user testing before, it opened up a completely different way of looking at the customer journey.
More importantly, the team could see the problems for themselves.
I didn't need Design to hand them a list of things to fix. Engineers, Product and other stakeholders had watched customers struggle and could start solving those problems together.
The service we offered was clearly providing the right result, but you don't know how much room there is to iterate and develop your product until you see real customer interaction.
If your company has never done user experience testing before, the results can be massive.
As you continue, the findings might not always be quite so dramatic, but I've never run a session where we haven't learnt something that helped us iterate and improve the customer experience.