1. Out of the lab and on to the streets…
User experience feedback where the customers are
Nancy Shepard
User Experience Research and Design Group
January 2, 2013
2. Two ways of taking user experience research to
the customer
• At the Dell KACE conference at Dell World 2012
• In customers’ offices while they used their mobile devices to use a
product’s mobile application
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3. About the Dell KACE conference
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• Dec. 10-14, 2012 Austin TX
• 400 Dell KACE customers attended
• In addition, approximately 7,000 Dell customers attended the Dell
World conference adjacent to the KACE conference
• Dell KACE User Experience group set up a table in the conference
exhibitor hall
6. UX table
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• Besides informally talking with customers as they visited the table,
there were three calls-to-action:
– Invitation to provide their business cards if they'd like to participate
in upcoming usability studies
– Invitation to sit at the table and review some new product UI
designs and give feedback
– Invitation to sit at the table and sketch their ideal K1000 product
dashboard
• All three feedback methods were self-running, requiring little or
no study facilitation
9. User interface redesign study
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Participants looked at three different
UI designs and then gave feedback
using an online survey
10. UI dashboard study
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• Participants were given a large
drawing tablet, colored pencils,
pens and sticky notes
• They constructed their ideal
dashboard for their product
console, jotting notes to explain
how they want each dashboard
widget to work
11. Results
• Customer feedback for the new UI redesign was used to refine the
design. Out of the three designs, one emerged as the clear
preference for participants
• Customer drawings of their ideal dashboards revealed:
– Top categories of critical information they want on the dashboard
– How they want that information displayed (graphs, tables, etc.)
– How they want to interact with the dashboard components
– How they might want to modify and rearrange dashboard
components on a regular basis
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12. K1000 GO Mobile App Customer Study
• The Dell KACE K1000 endpoint systems management product has a
mobile app for users to use some of its top features while not at their
desks (K1000 GO mobile app)
• To augment and extend the existing customer feedback, on-site
customer visits were conducted November 6-7, 2013 in the Denver-
metro area to
– Observe and record customers using the mobile app in their own
environments
– Identify usability issues as they work with the app
– Gather feedback about enhancements
• Sessions were approximately one hour and were held at the
customers' sites
• Sessions were video and audio recorded
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13. Methodology
• This study was somewhat experimental using
new equipment:
– IPEVO Ziggi-HD High-Definition USB Document
Camera used to capture device use
– IPEVO Presenter software to display video on
laptop
• The laptop view was captured by a WebEx
recording
• While an auxillary mic was added, a backup
digital recorder was also used
• Audio quality was an issue and the digital
recording was overlaid later
• Also, using WebEx for recording the session
degraded the frame-rate of the video
• Using a different recording method in the
future (directly to the laptop with recording
software such as CamStudio) may solve some
of these issues
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14. Highlights
• This method was especially valuable
because we saw them use their own
mobile devices with their specific product
installations and data
• The videos and the customer
conversations proved very beneficial for
the mobile app development team to see
real usage out in the field
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"Oh, I like the way that looks. To me it's really nice. And so nice to look at a
machine if I was away from my desk and I got a phone call." -Missy
"I would bring up a new ticket, and just like what we do on the web interface, I
would change the impact, give it a category and change the status. I might also
change the due date. Then change the owner to myself. And I might add a
comment." -Leif
15. Results
• The onsite sessions showed opportunities for
– Improving navigation; users wanted a quicker way to get to the
app's separate sections without going back several screens to
Home each time
– Improving Search: users wanted to search on many more keywords
than what the app allowed
– Adding new features based on how it was used in their
environments
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