After spending two months on design and development, I finally had the opportunity to test some of the features in a tech pilot in Islamabad prior to the Master Trainer training. The pilot was conducted with teachers from a few Pehli Kiran schools, a network of schools providing education access to out-of-school children in neglected slums.
My tasks included:
Developing the series of user testing questions – the questions are designed to guide users in using the features, without explicitly providing instructions so that users can explore the app and provide feedback beyond the scripted questions
Ensuring that the necessary materials are available for user testing – given that some features require actual data, this required coordination to first collect and pre-load student and teacher information into the database
Managing the user testing process from end-to-end – as some features were already deployed in the staging environment while some features were still to be developed, we employed a combination of the staging environment and Useberry heatmap (which was managed by our UI/UX designer remotely) to complete the whole testing process
Consolidating feedback for improvement – all feedback participants are valuable, but invariably feedback from different participants can be conflicting and this requires identifying the key improvement areas based on the consolidated feedback from all participants
Despite having completed user testing in my prior work experience, conducting user testing in a low resource environment presented new and unexpected challenges for me. Instead of sitting with users in a comfortable café in my workplace building with various facilities and pre-arranged schedules for each user, we battled with poor internet connectivity and chorus of students’ chatter, all exacerbated by thunderstorms in a makeshift school.
I was extremely glad for this opportunity because it helped me to understand the concrete challenges of implementing technology solutions in a development context. I had a fresh perspective of what it takes for technology solutions to be successful and how technology solutions need to be adapted for infrastructure challenges that are unavoidable.
