Improving UX remotely
A remote collaboration tool for UX experts.
Context
Remote Usability Testing is a common term in the industry. The motto often is: “Test often, fail early”, i.e., find out what works very early on with the help of real users. But not always product designers, UX-designers or UI-designers can be at the same location as the target group they craft a product for.
Also companies try more and more to have employees work together beyond the borders of countries and between different offices of their corporation. Why should collaboration end when it’s time to measure and optimize the User Experience after User Testing was already done?
Problem
How easy is it for UX experts to collaborate with existing tools, regarding the evaluation of observations from User Testing? This is the concrete question my Bachelor Thesis deals with, titled “Remote Evaluation of Usability Testing results: Evaluation of existing tools and creation of a prototypical solution”.
Results
There are plenty of online collaboration tools out on the market, because the idea of remote collaboration is as old as the internet. Some of these tools are actually pretty interesting if you are looking for a software to remotely work on the evaluation of User Testing results. These tools also scored well when used by experts in the field. In a specific and structured test I evaluated the apps Mural and Conceptboard with the help of real users.
Screenshot of the prototype in use
Prototype
Unfortunately, there was no tool that experts rated as a hundred percent fitting for their daily use and that would make them really satisfied when working with it. So in the context of this thesis a concept for a new tool was created, that incorporates some of the advantages of existing tools.
As a proof-of-concept for the draft a prototype was created in a short period with help of the frontend view framework React.js. User’s work will only be saved in their browsers when using the prototype and most of the functionality is still very basic. Yet, the overall development time was not much more than a few days of work.
Project details
Bachelor Thesis
This project represents the content of my Bachelor Thesis. The work included the evaluation of existing tools, preparation and conduction of User Testing with real users, the creation of an alternative concept on basis of findings of the evaluations and the creation of a prototype to have an example implementation of the concept.
Conclusion
In the area of Remote Testing as well as Remote Collaboration there are surely still lots of exciting chapters to be written in the future. But ineffective remote collaboration can already be seen as a challenge that can be overcome. It was very exciting to evaluate the different tools, develop a concept and most of all to create a functioning prototype in a short period of time.
