Fortune 50 Healthcare Benefits provider transitions to Agile UX testing

Our primary contact started with the company eight years ago as a UX designer and now oversees usability testing both in the main lab and from a satellite office.

“I conduct the vast majority of our usability testing on UserZoom. My team services the entire enterprise, putting in place governance around digital practices to ensure that the projects we undertake are strategic and to make sure we’re using our resources wisely.”

The UserZoom Solution

Four years prior, the customer sought an online tool to improve upon its in-lab surveys and testing. At the same time, the company transitioned from the older style waterfall development to a more modern hybrid agile development process.

This created a need for the team to turn around usability testing more quickly and in finer-grained segments to test specific aspects of each design.

“We had a personnel issue. We wanted to serve the company’s growing needs without having to staff up. We recognized that the online tools available were getting better. We examined a number of different tools and decided UserZoom had a number of the capabilities we were looking for, all in one place. That was a big advantage over having to use SaaS tools from three or four different vendors; we like that UserZoom is integrated.”

The customer then integrated mobile usability testing into its repertoire with UserZoom. The digital practices team used UserZoom to record testing sessions and visually inspect mouse movements and clicks for testing, giving them the ability to see what tasks people are attempting to complete and when users are struggling.

The company saw UserZoom as a valuable extension to its in-lab testing, giving them the ability to analyze product usability outside of the lab and still obtain visual feedback on what’s occurring and why.

UserZoom also empowered its customer to keep up with the demands of its new agile development timeframes. The company’s digital practices team used UserZoom’s remote usability testing to launch studies and answer specific questions in as little as two weeks (the length of a sprint) rather than the two or three months required for in-lab testing.

“Anyone familiar with agile development knows it’s fairly common practice to run in two-week sprints. It’s a challenge! Pieces are often being developed that need to be tested quickly.

You have to schedule time in the lab 60-90 days in advance, but agile can’t stand that kind of advance notice. With UserZoom Manager, we can plan and execute tests in response to the needs and turnaround times that are embodied in the agile process.”

Results

By using UserZoom to go beyond in-lab testing, the digital practices team found itself saving costs and time, and the team shifted into a proactive research approach.

“Because UserZoom is so simple and quick, we don’t chargeback use of the tool or manpower to create usability tests, and we’re able to do testing of our own volition. That is to say, we can identify digital properties we want to improve, we can fund and run the tests because they’re so inexpensive, and then share the results with the owners of those properties. It helps other teams to be proactive about improving their products.”

The customer used UserZoom to test complex components on its main secure website ranging from registration and login to menu navigation and comprehension.

In one case, the team developed and tested a prototype to prove an 85% success rate with new registrants, a stark contrast from the 60% drop-off range they were seeing on the old site.

“It’s more than usability, it goes to user experience. We’re able to take UX research and design, test it, validate it, and make changes.

In our secure site, we’ve done baseline testing over the last two or three years, measuring improvements in standard tasks like finding claims and explanation of benefits, the doctor lookup tool, using tools to find the cost of certain procedures – in every case, we’ve been able to improve the usability of the experience in the range of 5-20%.

Even a 5% improvement is significant when we have more than 2 million visitors per month to these websites.”

From here, the customer is exploring UserZoom’s click testing, using the heat maps and dynamic analytics to automatically generate reports to share with project managers. This has reduced the time required to deliver a report from a full week to a couple of hours.