Katie Dickerson

Reading Time: 5 minutes

When we do user research with businesses, we often hear the same things over and over again, regardless of which design, platform or web page we’re testing.  

Here are a few things that our customers consistently tell us: 

1. Get to the point 

Business owners are time-poor. They don’t want to waste time reading through a lot of content. We need to get to the point quickly or we’ll lose them. 

They like clear, simple language and bullet points. They hate long paragraphs and jargon. 

When it comes to our digital services, we tend to focus a lot of how things work technically and what they look like – which are both important – but so much of the feedback we get from customers is about the words that we use. Words matter. We need to choose them carefully. 

Customer quotes 

• “There are a lot of words there and my time is really precious.”  

• “I don’t have the time to read the whole page.”  

• “I’m dyslexic – that wall of words is off putting. I’d prefer to see it broken down a wee bit.” 

Continue reading “10 things that businesses consistently tell us”

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Part of me wonders if I should say this, but…I love it when user research goes wrong. 

Sometimes you go into user research with a hypothesis and the research validates it. That’s great. That’s easy. But what I really love is when you go in with a hypothesis and the research totally flips it on its head. That’s when you learn the most.  

I recently did some user research on a document that we’re using to support our new approach to helping companies. It outlines what their project is, what support Scottish Enterprise and our partners can offer them, and how we plan to measure outcomes. We went in wanting to know what companies thought about the format of the document and if there was anything about it that didn’t work for them. We hypothesized that: 

• Some of the language wasn’t customer-focused enough, and people would be put off by it 
• The second page of the document that lists the support that we offer would be the section that businesses would refer to the most 
• They would prefer a digital version of the document over a paper version 

Continue reading “When users tell you that you’re focusing on the wrong thing – listen to them”

Reading Time: 3 minutes

As part of the recent Green Jobs funding call, the project team asked if the service design team could help with level two system support. This meant helping with technical issues that customers were having if the enquiry team couldn’t resolve them. 

I didn’t want to do it at first. I’m not really that technical, and I was afraid that I wouldn’t know how to help. Even though our service adoption team gave us training and a knowledge bank that we could use, I still didn’t feel confident on my first shift. 

To my surprise, it was actually an interesting – and eye-opening – experience. Here’s what I learned: 

Continue reading “How providing tech support helped me understand our customers better”