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During one of our weekly meetings, we spent hours debating the right design treatment for our upcoming live session experience revamp. Each of us had different opinions about the best way to balance adding new features without introducing information overload for the moderator.
We paused and thought that it was time to taste our own champagne, now that we had a low-fi design mock in place, it was a good time to ask our own beta users for feedback.
The live session experience is one of the key modules in ensuring a smooth moderated usability testing experience on Betafi. It allows the interviewer to interact with their user on a video call and share different prototypes, screens, and take notes without having to switch between tabs apprehensively. As we embarked on a design refresh, we had to ensure that the cool new features being added didn’t overwhelm the interviewer.
Here’s how we co-created our Live Session Experience with our users
We started by reaching out to existing users of our product to understand their struggles as well as get feedback on the new designs of the live session revamp.
1. The Story of Building a Welcoming Waiting Room
We were excited to get feedback on the new designs, but one of the first suggestions from our users was to have a waiting room in place. In the remote world, with calls on Zoom/Google Meet and the like being a norm, there was an expectation to have a waiting room to adjust your audio and video settings before hopping into the call. It sounds so obvious in hindsight, but we had missed that in our initial iteration so when the user joined using the session link, they were taken directly into the session.
“It would be nice to have a waiting room. The link directly takes me into the session every time”
We quickly built mocks of the meeting room, on the same theme as our new live session designs and quickly realized the need to make the waiting room welcoming. That’s when we realized the impact of colors. We made sure that our waiting room is colorful and welcoming.
“Hmm, I think the black background of the screen is not too welcoming”
Here’s what our journey of going from no waiting room at all to a super welcoming waiting room looked like:
This one looks much more welcoming, doesn’t it? The white background of the screen and a waiting room where you can check your audio and video did the trick!
2. A Small UI Tweak That Made Note Taking Significantly Easier
The Betafi platform makes note-taking easier, hands down. Our users can easily take notes as insights emerge on a call, making the process a lot more organized and structured without the need to alt-tab Google Docs/Notion with Zoom continuously. As an added benefit, the notes sync with the exact moment in the conversation. However, our users had shared they still had to use alt-tab to access their interview question templates. So we embarked on building this feature into our product. Our thought process was to create two screens to refer the interview questions and take notes.
As simple as the thought may sound, the enhanced note taking experience was still complicated.. Ultimately, we intended to provide a space for taking notes and another for checking questions. Here’s a peek into our earlier “MVP” version where users could view their questions and also take notes.
Seems like a lot of moving around, doesn’t it? Well, our users felt so too.
“When I was writing, I was looking at the question, then writing the answer in different tabs. All this while I also have to listen to the participant and probe. That’s too much.”
We had our Eureka 💡 moment then - to allow our users to write notes on the same tab that shows questions. It would be more intuitive to give them the option to take notes right beneath the questions and reduce the hassle of switching between tabs. So, here’s what our revamped version looks like:
The new design made everybody’s lives easier. Our users could now simply note down an insight while asking a question. And if they had some off-topic notes, they could do that too in the notes section.
3. Why do you have 4 sharing options?
That’s a fair question that one of our users had. It seemed like we went a little overboard with the sharing in our initial design. We wanted to make sure that the user has all options available. But, we realized that too many cooks can spoil the broth. By giving our users all the possible sharing options, they were quite confused. We decided to take it down a notch and clear the clutter to improve their sharing experience. Here’s how we transitioned:
By reducing the options, we realized that we in fact helped our users to seamlessly share while engaging with their participants. This is exactly what our Live Session is meant to do - ensuring our users actively interact and collect timely, valuable feedback from their users to build amazing products.
Our Experience Proved That Testing Prototypes Often and Early Is Totally Worth It!
Sharing and testing your prototypes, especially when they are in the design stage can be challenging. It can be difficult to walk your users through your product when every feature is not fleshed out so well. We understand the hesitation that comes along in this phase. However, with these tests, you can uncover certain in-hindsight obvious gems that can be monumental for your product.
Usability testing has definitely helped us build a better product much faster. We continue to build an intuitive, powerful user research product that has slick features with our community of beta users. Betafi is eager to grow our community and would be more than excited to gather more feedback. If you find our product interesting or have cool suggestions to amp up our product, write to us at hello@betafi.co.
