Dare Digital - case study
Dare is an interactive marketing agency founded on the core belief that strong ideas lead to better business results. In 2009, Dare was named Digital Agency of the Decade by Campaign magazine as well as Digital Agency of the Year by Marketing Magazine. Dare has also been named Campaign's Digital Agency of the Year no fewer than 4 times in the last 7 years.
Background
We were contacted by Dare Digital to provide a proposal on user testing for one of their key client's websites to identify areas of improvement on a proposed new calendar function. They wanted to determine how representative users use the site and the response to the new feature they were suggesting.
Screenshot
Challenge to meet
We were asked to gather practical insights during user interviews that would inform the design and development of the new calendar feature and to assess if the proposed designs were working. We were working within an agile framework alongside a third party who were providing the back end development work. Given the nature of the devlopment approach and the tight deadlines, we had to get the findings reported back from the user testing agreed on the same day as the testing.
Benefits and outcomes
We identified suggestions and improvements to the calendar functionality and design early on in the design, rather than waiting till the end of the design and build process to establish that changes would need to be made to improve the usability and user experience.
The report we produced was not a typical usability report, but more of a collaborative issue list with notes around prioritisation of issues and assigned responsibiity to the relevant company taking into account design, business and technical constraints.
What we did
We recruited 8 participants, made up of existing and prospective customers of varying age ranges and gender. These were then interviewed using a mixture of self determined and predefined tasks on the website.
How this was achieved
We ran a morning test with 4 users with 1 hour interviews for each one, with a collaborative session after lunch to agree the list of issues with the companies involved. The design and development companies immediately set to work on the issues identified and fixed them for the next iteration or 'sprint' as this is also often called. We then ran the tests again in the following sprint with the suggetsed changes incorporated and reported that a lot of the initial issues from round 1 testing had been improved in this round.
