Spotlight on WXG Conference
by Scott Agass Director
Posted on April 12, 2017
The NXT recently attended the WXG (Web Expo Guildford) Conference, hosted by Kyan Media and Wirehive Hosting at the Harbour Hotel in Guildford on 23rd March 2017.
The day was mix of presentations from digital industry speakers and business leaders sharing their expertise.
We found Connor Ward's (Head of UX/Design at British Gas) presentation (pictured above) most relevant to the work of NXT discussing the importance of UX (User Experience) testing of web applications. His digital team at British Gas have pioneered their own website testing "lab" and promoted the mantra of "publish then test, you never get it perfect first time round."
Connor stressed the importance of user centered design and his favourite quote was "if you don't talk to your users, how do you know how to talk to your users?" The British Gas lab started by testing focused processes such as asking users to register or sign-up to a service. The tester was invited into a coffee shop and the process was noted and subsequent tasks were generated from viewing the users behavior. Now, on V9 of their testing suite, they use cameras to view facial expressions, record sessions and have them facilitated but the response from the sessions are still the same as V1 in the coffee shop. Review a users behavior and reduce barriers to entry for them to have a better digital experience.
As NXT develop website applications, we also need to support our clients on-going maintenance and support of their systems. Since attending the conference we thought that we should implement some formal UX post-live testing options for our clients and their application systems. We will now offer the following services to improve application performances:
- Quarterly or bi-annually select 3-6 independent users (users who have never seen nor been part of the project) to test 3 pre-determined processes.
- View and record (using a 3rd party screen recording software) the users completing these pre-determined processes
- Notate live during these experiments any critical sticking points or issues arising from the experiments
- Report the findings and create a series of tasks to rectify any problems
According to Connor, the maximum audience required is 6 people as all sticking points will be found from this sample size. Any larger the same examples will be noted but it incurs more administration to manage.
If you're interested in creating some UX testing experiments on your application, please do get in touch.
Image credit to Kyan.
About the Author
Scott leads the team of NXT designers and is responsible for all pixels and margins that NXT send to clients. With a keen interest in all the emerging web design trends, Scott loves a great examples of responsive sites and great typography. If he's not waiting for Photoshop to open he can be found with his family in Fareham including the latest edition Teddy the Cockapoo or trying not to get injured playing Squash.