Why is User Experience Testing rarely a continuous effort?

When we speak to clients embarking upon a digital transformation, the user experience (UX) of the end product is always high on the agenda. A lot of time can be spent researching optimal experiences for their customers, testing with prototypes and creating many iterations until a concept is finalised for development. Somewhere along the way, negotiations and deviations from these research-backed concepts begin to take place, and the final product may end up in a different state at go-live to what was originally intended from a customer experience point of view.

Businesses recognise that a poor user experience can damage their brand impact, customer loyalty, and significantly impact financials. So why do we see fluctuations in the importance given to assuring the quality of the user experience of a product on digital transformation programmes? Primarily because it’s still not seen as an integral part of delivery lifecycles, and usability testing doesn’t take place often enough after the initial concepts have been validated. 

The main challenges that often have to be overcome are:

1. Justifying the cost of continuous research. Hiring usability labs, recruitment costs, participant remuneration, and transport around the country to ensure samples are representative of the demographic in question all add up.
2. Convincing technical leads that UX defects are as important as functional issues is a slow paradigm shift.
3. As project timelines progress, budgets and timings begin to drive the priority of expenditure. As a result, services, such as usability testing, seen as ‘auxiliary’ to the core delivery process are omitted.

Our Approach

Deloitte Testing & Quality work closely with client UX design teams to understand their customer research maturity and their needs. We help to shape their customer research strategies and processes for communicating insights in a meaningful, sustainable way. This involves embedding ourselves within the client’s UX team from the very start, to collaborate and establish best practices for the client in terms of research methods, documentation, and the optimal way to communicate research insights to the wider team. This aims to ensure the value of customer research is understood and supported by stakeholders throughout the engagement.

From the outset, we like to employ a hybrid approach to research and quality assurance operating on two levels:

The first level addresses the need to implement continuous customer testing across the project lifecycle.

Traditionally, projects have concentrated customer testing at the start during the analysis phase with little to no communication with the wider team on next steps, let alone documentation. When stakeholders and design teams are not communicating effectively, this can lead to tension over design decisions, justifying further testing, and making a case for development re-work.

In order for us to demonstrate the value of research past the initial analysis phase, we seek to keep teams talking about customer centricity and why it’s important to keep customers at the heart of the product’s end state. By involving and collaborating with our client teams, we bring them along each step of the journey with a sense of joint ownership. As a result we assess the current state of customer testing activity and help build out maturity in a number of activities such as: 

• Assessing personas and helping to create new ones for future states as the product evolves as well as explaining their role in the accurate recruitment of customers to all team members so a balanced participant group can be achieved for a fairer test.
• Testing with users beyond the analysis phase to incrementally demonstrating feedback on functionality during development as a means to inform stakeholders of the way their products are being received after initial design approval. We expose participants to the product in early build states, pre-production environments as we approach a launch, as well as conducting tests once we have gone live.
• Promoting transparency at each stage of testing. We document findings, and create insights reports to play-back to delivery teams and key client stakeholders. This ensures we have the right people at hand, earlier, to prioritise and action any insights from these testing sessions in line with our delivery timescales.
• Creating a habit of presenting back insights following a research session and open the floor for discussion to align design, test, development, and management stakeholders on next steps.
• Creating a repository of our findings, categorised by functionality, for other teams to consult and feed into design systems.

The second level looks at improving internal QA processes after a requirement or a user story is built.

By bringing members from the BA, UX, and functional test teams together and creatively testing built user stories early, design and usability issues can be identified, prioritised, and fixed before the weight of compressed timescales forces them lower down the list of things to do and their risk of downstream impact is magnified. This early exploratory testing focusses on the UI, design and wireframe fidelity, and usability of interactions.

Benefits

We help clients to transform sporadic and lighter-touch approaches to UX Testing into a robust, traceable, continuous assessment of end user needs, with insights feeding back into day-1 and day-2 delivery backlogs in a timely manner. This means our client’s delivery roadmap starts and ends with its customers in focus.

As a result, our clients are able to enter go-lives with a level of confidence from pre-launch assessments they have not previously been able to evidence. The use of post-launch assessments provides real-world insights to inform next steps, accounting for user and project goals.

Every transformation starts from within, and we’re incredibly proud of the journey to great digital experiences we’ve been able to take our client and their customers on so far.