User research within a short time span for HR department

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What we did

Commissioned by the Human Resources department of the University of Twente, GriDD has setup, executed, analyzed and presented the results of a user research, in only four weeks. The user research was executed for an application which was under development. In the application supervisors and employees could document their annual progress reports. The goal of the user research was to validate whether the new application was easy to use and met the expectations of the users. The research should lead to concrete improvements to lower the threshold to use the application.

In the first week of the project, in consultation with the contact at the University of Twente (UT), a research plan was setup, in which both supervisors and employees were asked to perform tasks and answer questions using the test version of the application. In the second week, the university gathered participants for the research and GriDD meanwhile created a research protocol to be used during the research. In the third week, on a single day seven participants came by for 45 minute sessions and afterwards the analysis was directly started so we could deliver the results and improvement suggestions in the fourth week of the project.

This project is an excellent example to show that the execution of a user research does not have to be expensive and time-consuming; the research did not interfere with the development of the application but did contribute to a lot of insights which eventually led to an easy to use application. It was fun to work on this project, because due to the good collaboration with the UT, it was possible to get a very good result in a fast and pragmatic way.

"The user research as performed by GriDD provided us with insights in the usage of the application which were not detected during regular testing. Examples are usability issues from end-user perspective, interaction flaws and unclear or obsolete information. Furthermore, it also showed us which parts of the application did work correctly."

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