Testing with real humans

I recently joined Pureprofile, a Data & Insights (D&I) company, as Experience Lead. We are currently in the process of rebuilding our holistic platform experience, including the consumer facing web and mobile apps, to be user-centric and absolutely focussed on the customer experience.

2019 has ushered in a real focus to improving Pureprofile’s end-to-end user experience. We have a mission to fundamentally refine and improve our offering. We want to make sure we are, and remain, a design-led company by putting our users first.

As an experience designer I thought it was a great and unique opportunity to have such easy access to real human beings. The fact that if I wanted to find something out I can simply ask our panel. Whereas in the past I have used all sorts of techniques to get opinions and insights such as sending out questionnaires to my networks, using services such as usabilityhub.com, and stopping people in the street (which is always fun!) and offering to buy them their morning coffee in exchange for 10 minutes of their time.

This is the first time I have worked with a D&I company and one of the deciding factors of joining for me was quite simply the power of having almost instant, real responses available to me whenever I need. This kind of real, valuable feedback cannot and must not be underestimated. I feel I am currently the envy of a lot of my designer buddies!

For example, if we want to explore new ways for our panel to complete surveys we can ask our panel if they want to complete audial surveys on their smart speaker. I can ask them. 10,000 real humans. Right now.

Out of 10,000 people, 2,553 of them own a smart speaker. Out of that 2,553, 1,322 expressed they would like to complete surveys on that smart speaker. That’s 51.78%.

Is that a compelling enough reason for the business to allocate resources to creating voice surveys? Potentially, but the value of knowing that before a single cent has been spent is incredible.

Obviously this is all quantitative so there would be some real (exciting!) work to drill down into the qualitative aspect if this is something we decide to do.

It’s an exciting area to be working in and I’m stoked to be a part of it.