Blog by Mark Palmer, User experience specialist at Registers of Scotland.

User research has been progressing at pace since our last update in December, with some really useful feedback being received from customers and fed into our planning and prioritisation sessions within the customer enhancements project.

As has been previously mentioned in this blog, we’ve been conducting user research with our customers as part of our customer enhancement project for some months now with great success. However, one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced up until now is identifying a means of reaching as many customers as possible, particularly given the wide geographical spread of our customer base.

Since early January, we’ve been trialling remote user research over the internet. This works by contacting customers online using screen sharing online conference software. Once a customer has agreed to be involved in a session, we simply send them a link which they can use to join the online meeting. Customers don’t need to install any software. All they need is a web browser.

Once the customer is connected to the session, we can share prototypes and designs with them using the screen sharing capabilities built into this software in the same way as if we were sitting in the same room.

So far, it’s proven to be a very effective way of getting feedback from customers quickly. Capturing feedback from all the organisations we work with, regardless of where they are located, is critical to the customer enhancements project, so the main benefit is that we can expand our reach to include customers who are located outside the central belt.

If you are interested in taking part in user research, please do sign up to be part of our user experience panel. We look forward to meeting you and getting your feedback, either ‘virtually’ or in person.