Intro
During my time as a UX Research Intern at Questrade, we ran tens of research studies, and I had the opportunity to assist or lead 11 of those. The one that I’ll be focusing on in this case study was a moderated usability test that was run in August 2023.
About the Study
One of the studies that I had the opportunity to lead was a moderated usability test, that aimed to explore how users interacted with the Questmortgage microsite, and gain their feedback on the switching and refinancing flows within that. The research proposal came through the pipeline from the product team, who wanted to find ways to improve the existing site and make it more intuitive for both new borrowers, and existing borrowers. As I was leading this study, I was responsible for choosing the type of methodology we would use, and running the test itself.
Methodology
For me, the most important thing when selecting a methodology is to start at the end and work backwards. In this instance, it meant looking at the research objectives, and figuring out what the best way of achieving those would be. In this case, the objectives were to gain qualitative feedback on:
customers ability to find information on the site
what kind of customers would be attracted to an online lender
concerns that potential customers might have with switching to an online lender
overall feedback on the flow
Based off of this, O felt that an unmoderated study wouldn’t yield the results we were looking for, and that a moderated study was the way to go.
The Test
Unfortunately due to an NDA, I cannot share any details of the test itself. However, to provide some context, I set up a screener on UserTesting to hone into a specific demographic that we were looking to test with, and then ran 10 user sessions. I moderated 5 of them, and note-took for another 5 which my coworker moderated. These notes would later come into play when we would synthesize the information to pull key insights out of, so that we could provide recommendations to the product team.
The Results
Again, I cannot share any of the results themselves. However, I can give an overview on how we continued with the next stages. With notes from the user sessions, we thematically grouped all of our notes, and began pulling out key insights that related to them. We then sorted these insights based off of our initial research objectives, before compiling a presentation deck with some of our notes, quotes, insights, key findings, and recommendations.
