{"id":1453,"date":"2014-07-02T14:38:01","date_gmt":"2014-07-02T14:38:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.gov.scot\/digital\/?p=1453"},"modified":"2017-07-20T09:17:01","modified_gmt":"2017-07-20T09:17:01","slug":"user-testing-alpha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.gov.scot\/digital\/2014\/07\/02\/user-testing-alpha\/","title":{"rendered":"User testing in alpha"},"content":{"rendered":"

This\u00a0is a\u00a0post by Paul Wheatley, our Senior UX Designer<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

With mygov.scot we have taken a user-centred approach to design. Practically, this involves a number of methods, but the most important is that we conduct regular testing with real users at least once every fortnight on an on-going basis.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

How do we take a user centred approach?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

First we decide what we are actually going to test.<\/span><\/p>\n

We achieve this by looking at our \u2018sprint\u2019 backlog to find out what stories are planned for the next sprint. As an example, we might look at a story called \u2018As a citizen I need to be able to navigate back to the home page from any page within the site\u2019. We would think about how a citizen might expect to achieve this based on feedback from previous tests and industry best practice.<\/span><\/p>\n

We would build a \u2018clickable prototype\u2019, which is basically a simple website you can interact with, and\u00a0then write a testing hypothesis and testing scenarios for the citizen to work through.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example the hypothesis might be<\/b>:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCitizens know to click on the mygov.scot logo to return to the home page\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The testing scenario could be<\/b>:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSuggest we need a scenario that would involve multiple needs and a return to the homepage\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The citizen will then be asked to use the clickable prototype to complete the scenario. The testing team monitor what the citizen does using screen sharing to determine if the hypothesis passes or fails. Generally we would take four or five hypotheses into user testing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Following the testing, we get the UX team together with other members of the scrum team to split the hypotheses into these categories:<\/span><\/p>\n