Remote User Testing in the new COVID-19 World

Jason Beres [Infragistics] / Monday, May 18, 2020

While the rest of you were planning your New Year's resolutions, the Indigo team started early to create a more simplified, beautiful, and focused experience for Indigo.Design. We analyzed every single workflow and pixel with the ultimate goal of making you more productive—whether you are designing apps, collaborating with others, or usability testing your designs. What you see today are a whole new brand and user experience. This redesign effort also sets the stage for new capabilities coming later this year.

New brand identity and a simplified user experience

We are launching a new brand identity and design language for Indigo.Design. Our main goal is to offer a consistent and focused experience to make you more productive. And while we are all about productivity, there is always room for fun. Look out for our brand ambassadors who guide you along!

Image showing Indigo.Design ambassadors

Also, as a product matures over time, it tends to gain functionality,  and that can sometimes distract from the core value of the product. So this time instead of just adding new functionality, we also trimmed features that are not used enough or ahead of their time ;). Naturally, this change will be obvious to our existing customers more than people who just started to explore Indigo.Design. As a result, what you see is a focused gallery view with two key spaces— prototypes and usability tests.

 Prototype gallery

 Usability test gallery

In addition to hosting for your designs, you will discover a full-featured prototyping tool to edit prototypes published from Sketch app and inspect visual specifications. If you don’t use the Sketch app, you can import your designs as images to create prototypes from scratch using the prototype editor. Similarly, the built-in usability test feature lets you conduct unmoderated tests, and then watch video replays of the sessions with detailed analytics (more on this later).

Prototype editor with inspect     

***  Try a sample prototype to see inspect in action ***

Usability testing for desktop or mobile app designs

The usability testing feature underwent a complete rethink to make it easier to both create tests and analyze results.

You can create tests for any of the designs in your cloud workspace. You can either publish your prototypes from Sketch or create it directly in your workspace. When you create a new test, you will see a live test creation experience, where you can add new tasks and then interact with the live prototype to record an expected path. This information will be used when presenting you with the results and segmenting participants.

 Set up a usability test (GIF)

Everything is saved in real-time so you don’t need to confirm or cancel anything. You can change the default test settings when you set up the test, and we have tried to put in some good defaults to speed up your workflow. A “preview” option lets you take part exactly like a participant without recording any results.

Participate in usability tests from any device

The indigo.design solution lets your stakeholders and users take part in a usability test on any device, as long as they have access to a web-browser. You can invite them by sharing a link to the test, which makes it really easy to invite via email, chat or forum post.

Optionally, when someone takes part using the desktop Chrome browser, they can install the Chrome extension that lets us record the user’s session. Not to worry, users are always in control of whether they want to provide camera and voice streams before they start the test. Even if the video is not available, we still collect task analytics and how users interacted with your design.

 Enable Indigo.Design Chrome extension

Did we mention that you can create any number of tests with unlimited participants? Well, you can! This frees you up to test when you want and with anyone you like. Your participants don’t even need to sign-in, further removing any obstacles to participation.

*** Take part in a live usability test ***

Enhanced usability testing dashboard for faster learnings

We are introducing a new analytics dashboard for usability tests and this, by far, is the biggest improvement we’ve made. Usability tests on Indigo.Design makes it easy to not only collect analytics related to participation, but you can also watch a video replay of the participant’s session.

And while watching videos allows you to really experience the session from the users’ perspective, it’s time-consuming. To address this problem, the analytics dashboard had been redesigned to give you quick insights into overall behavior and also individual behavior— even before you watch any video. We feel this is going to save you a lot of time, allowing you to locate problem areas in your flow quickly.

 Image showing usability test report

The usability test report has four main areas of interest:

  1. Task analytics overview- This shows a brief task description, success rate (%), # of participates who succeeded vs. total participants, and avg. time on task
  2. Completion funnel- this is an aggregate representation of the expected path you defined for each task, how many people used that exact path, where drop-offs occur, and where unexpected interactions are happening.
  3. User segments- automatically categorize participation based on whether they used the expected path, used an alternate success path or could not complete the task with the design provided.
  4. Participation data table- shows the session details for each participant, with a timeline view (Click-path) that visualizes expected and unexpected interactions. Hovering on any timeline marker provides a quick preview of how and where the user interacted with the design.

If the participant has provided a video replay, you will see a “play video” option listed. Even when there is no video, the click-path option lets you visualize any users’ session.

Need more security? Indigo-On Prem is for you.

As mentioned earlier, with Indigo.Design, you can access both your prototypes and inspect in one place. You can get all the power of cloud.indigo.design as a private Indigo Server so that only members from your organization have access. Your private server also supports unmoderated usability testing with user videos to ensure that you have the right design before you generate code. We truly believe in the value of iterating with real customers, and Indigo.Design On-Prem offers a unified platform to design and evaluate your designs as frequently as required.

Contact sales@infragistics.com for a demo of Indigo.Design On-Prem, our private server offering. 

Get started with Indigo.Design

Don't stop with prototypes; get it in the hands of real users with our 1-click sharing, and the ability to view prototypes on any device. Harness the power of Indigo.Design Cloud for recording user sessions and task analytics

Get Indigo.Design Professional starting at $39/mo for a complete UX prototyping solution. Want Code Generation? Get Indigo.Design Enterprise for $99/month!