Creating a Testing Strategy for a Retail Innovation Lab

The Problem:

An innovation lab for a large international retailer had created a new application for their store employees. This application would dramatically change the employee’s current workflow for certain in-store tasks, but usage would enable the corporate team to collect more accurate sales data. The team had already identified that average adoption rates for new in-store technology were low, so to try and increase product success they hired our team to create a user testing plan for the application.

Our Process & Solution:

My first step was to perform a heuristic evaluation of the application to identify potential user pain-points. I used the Nielsen Norman Groups’ Ten Usability Heuristics as a base for our evaluation. After performing my own evaluation, I had 3 additional UX designers perform their own evaluations based on the same categories. I then analyzed the results by ranking the severity of each instance and used these to create a list of hypothesis for further testing. 

From these hypotheses I created a full testing plan for their team. In my plan I recommended conducting quantitative usability testing in their in-house testing lab and qualitative field research in a local store. After approval of the plan, I created detailed testing scripts, a testing prototype for usability studies, and provided their team with guidance on best practices. The results of these studies would be used to populate the roadmap and backlog for V1.1 of the application.