Penelope Rance

This week I attended the UserTesting Hi World event. Split across two days it makes for a more manageable amount of time out of the office.

First up was a morning of workshops. I signed up for the ‘Benchmarking the User Experience’ workshop run by Rosa Smith, as this is something I have not done before, but thought there would be some value in knowing what to do.

It was a small group which made it easy to get involved and ask questions. It was also very interactive allowing us to put into practice what had already been discussed.

What I really loved though, was that although the session was run by UserTesting and they did encourage us to use their platform, it was a session much more about the theory of doing benchmarking than the ins and outs of using their software.

Rosa ran us through why you might want to do a benchmarking study, the different types, when to run them, what you can test (anything!), the sort of tasks and questions to use and how to structure them. She even talked us through how to report our findings back.

While I might already know how to write tasks and structure a test, it was great to find out more about other ways of collecting metrics, for instance using SUS or NPS, and how to put something together that can be reused over and over again.

The next day I joined UserTesting again for a morning of talks. While all were interesting, the two that really stood out for me were Catherine Richards' talk based on getting Tesco Bank to be customer obsessed and Ken Hughes talking about why we need to make customers central to everything we do.

Catherine talked about how they created 'Customer Wednesday' where customers were invited into the office for interviews while everyone could come to watch, including their CEO.

She also talked about creating pop up design studios within their call centres and getting everyone involved in call listening. Their conclusion was that they had over estimated peoples money and digital savviness, something I think we do too. I will definitely be taking her ideas back to my team.

Ken talked about how to stay relevant to your customers and users. I loved his explanation of how things have changed for our customers. They are now the blue dot in the centre of their mobile screen and everything revolves around them. It is no good debating if this is right or wrong, we must accept this is the reality and work with it.

It was a great talk to end the event on. Thanks to everyone who spent time putting it all together.