Policy Expert case study: keeping our insurance powered by people

Our friends at Policy Expert have kindly pulled a few words together on how they used WhatUsersDo to help improve the experience their customers get from their service and site…..

From day one of building policyexpert.co.uk, we’ve always placed great emphasis on customer experience. Even in the conception of our business idea, the focus has always been about delivering a customer-centric service that puts the user at the heart of our decision-making. From our overall proposition right down to our website navigation – we wanted to make sure we were always listening to our customers and continually acting on their feedback. This is where WhatUsersDo has been incredibly insightful.

Insurance is considered a traditional industry – sometimes even a little stuck in its ways, but with the popularity of online comparison sites, more and more customers are turning to the web to find insurance deals. Our mission was to go one stage further and create a next-generation online broker that would look after customers beyond the comparison stage and offer exceptional customer service from quote through to claim. This was a fresh way of thinking about insurance – so it needed a fresh approach to usability.

In the early days of our website build, we invited the general public into our London offices to trial various stages of the application. Their suggestions were taken on board and helped us shape the website during the initial build stages. However, there are limits to the scope of face-to-face user testing and we wanted to make sure we were consistently accessible to all customers so we could harness feedback from a wider user base.

Since our home insurance launch, we’ve found WhatUsersDo to be an extremely useful tool in helping us check in with our online customers, hear their feedback and adopt their suggestions where possible. It’s almost like an MOT for our website and application – we can see which parts are running smoothly and which areas require a little tinkering.

We were pleased to see an overall positive response from recent testing, with most areas of our site being highlighted as successful. However, this is far from being a back-patting exercise and has helped us focus on those isolated areas causing confusion for users. Gathering first-hand responses about our design, messaging and usability has given way to several immediate improvements and planned improvements to our site.

One such immediate change was simply to put our contact details in a more prominent place. Users felt it was important to instantly know how to reach us, as this information instilled confidence and offered convenience. With a small tweak to our landing page header – our telephone number is now much more visible. Equally, users commented that our hero images and text scrolled too quickly on our main homepage – something that was easy and quick to adjust.

With the day-to-day demands of a business, it can be very easy to get into a bubble – always striving to build the next great piece of functionality for your website etc. As such, sometimes very simple usability issues can be overlooked – which is why a regular health check is essential. For example, our recent user testing through WhatUsersDo revealed the need for further explanation of some particular insurance terms. In addition, we found that we need to work harder in ensuring a complete understanding of our actual proposition and where we sit within the market – something we hope to address in our proposed re-design. Increased understanding should, in turn, give rise to increased appreciation of the benefits our service can offer.

While we view our current design as fresh and approachable, some comments viewed the illustrative style a little over casual for the industry. Of course, we need to balance this with other positive feedback we’ve received – but this may too lead to some changes in our overall branding.

WhatUsersDo has also helped us address a few minor stumbling blocks in our question set, hopefully resulting in an even smoother journey throughout our form. This includes more detailed messaging on some of the more complex questions, improved button prominence and further explanation in the instance of an unavailable quote.

We certainly plan to continue usability testing in this way to ensure our customers’ voices are always heard and our website, and service, keep evolving for the better.

Five tips to ensure your website is ready for Christmas

Hi all,

This is our latest blog post currently appearing in the Direct Commerce Association blog.

With over £6.8 billion spent online in the UK in the 2010 Christmas season and predictions that this will increase again this year, you need to be sure your website is up to the job. We’ve compiled five simple tips that will help website owners increase the number of Christmas visitors who become shoppers.

Here is the link to the full article

Here are our Top 5:
TIP 1: Get your FAQs into shape
TIP 2: Build trust with your returns policy
TIP 3: “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow” (please don’t)
TIP 4: Test website performance
TIP 5: Run a gifting usability test

If you have a different Top 5 or you can make this a top 10 we would love to hear from you!

Looking for a developer – is it you?

UPDATE: We have now filled this position.

WhatUsersDo are looking for a Developer who is comfortable programming in both a “back-end” LAMP environment as well as crafting UI code from Photoshop mock-ups. We are looking for a bit of enthusiasm and a bit of passion and we can guarantee you will be working with like-minded people. We also want a problem solver who is looking for a bit of flexibility in their role (we don’t think we know it all – but we are looking forward to learning a lot on the way).

You will work in a small dynamic team that’s focussed on delivering the best possible service for our clients by implementing exciting new features as well as optimising current systems and processes – if the company is going to work we need to make sure our User Experience is the best we can make it.

You will have the following:
- at least 2 years commercial web development experience
- hands on experience of the LAMP stack
- the ability to construct compliant CSS and HTML (from scratch)
- experience of Javascript to improve the user experience of a web application or site
- ambition

Ideally you will have some experience of Ajax and an understanding of how cloud computing can help growing businesses scale.

Why Us?
Millions of websites don’t work for the user (they really don’t!). Users find them frustrating and often muddle through. Our service gives clients (big or small) the user experience insights to do something about it. We hope that like us -  you feel that “websites should work” and telling clients “what users do” on them and “why they do it” might just make all the difference.

Why us? (the more factual & slightly dull version)
WhatUsersDo (who will be based in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne from September) is Europe’s leading online remote user experience testing & insights service. It was set up so anyone, in any size or type of organisation, can observe real people using websites quickly, easily and cost-effectively. It works by remotely recording, over the internet, users’ voices and screen sessions as they complete tasks, carried out in their natural surroundings on their own computers. Clients order online at www.whatusersdo.com and results are back within 12 hours – in video format showing what a user did and audio of their commentary and opinions. Pricing is £30-£70 per video with many of its mid to large clients (BT, TUI, Comet, DRL Ltd) testing on a monthly contracted basis with Enterprise discounts and advance features and functionality.

Interested?
Email: lee [at] whatusersdo dot com
T: 0845 302 4783

User overboard!

Thinking of taking a cruise? Thinking of searching for it or booking online? Well you may want to think again, it’s likely you’ll miss the boat. Because unless you know the exact itinerary, in what type of cabin, how many people it sleeps , the name of the ship and with which shipping line you want to go with then some of the main cruise websites don’t seem to want to help you.

See our findings on Travolution the UK’s leading multi-media brand for the online travel industry.

Snow Disruption: Gateshead.gov.uk usability review

As the snow spreads across the UK, people are turning to their local authority websites for the latest local information. With the adverse weather now into its fifth day in the North East of England we were not expecting to find too many usability issues at Gateshead.gov.uk. How wrong we were!

We set a single user three simple tasks to complete.

1. Is my child’s school Open or Closed?

The website’s home page has a prominent link to information about school closures and navigating to a specific school is relatively easy (they are listed alphabetically). Against each school a box displayed the status either Open or Closed but for many that box was empty.

In the following clip the user simply could not tell if their child’s school (Kells Lane) was Open or Closed and the link to school page did not work.

2. When will my bins be collected?

We thought that finding out whether bins are being collected or not would be a key task and might merit a link from the Home Page (in the same area as the School closures link), but it isn’t. In the following clip the user eventually found the information by using search, after navigating to the Collection and Disposal section of the website which did not yield the expect information.

3. Request for Gritting

Citizens can request that a street or path is gritted. Naturally, all councils need to prioritise gritting at these times, but we were surprised to find a broken link on this area of the website.

For some reason the Request Gritting page is a secure (https) page which only adds to the confusion.

Watch the following clip to “feel the user’s pain” and watch out for the broken link!

Summary

This single user test revealed some obvious areas where Gateshead Council could improve how information is both found and displayed. Getting this right will help build trust with Citizens who, according to central government policy, will be expected to increasingly transact online to reduce costs.

We normally recommend testing with five users, but in this case some of the issues were so obvious we stuck with just one.