A magnifying glass focused on beads that spell out new

User-led bug testing works!

By Kathryn Dingle 4 March 2021 3 minute read

The team has been hard at work developing our progressive web app and we are so pleased to say we now have the start of our app.

As with all new pieces of tech there bugs (Not the creepy crawly kind, but small errors or mistakes in the software which mean it doesn’t do want we wanted it to do!) Some are really obvious such a janky layout or a button not appearing on certain pages and some are harder to find, such as a specific option within a filter that doesn’t appear to work.

Digital Expert - Kathryn Dingle

By Kathryn Dingle

Digital Product Manager

Kathryn is NPC’s Digital Product Manager in the Innovation and Development team.

So how do you find them?

This can be done through Quality assurance (QA) processes like bug testing. Bug testing is designed to let a tester explore the product and find out what is working and what isn’t working. This is usually done in-house, but we decided to get our young person’s steering group involved for some rapid bug testing!

What we did:

The steering group assembled on zoom, they all have a link to the web app and we went through a series of tasks to see what they could do / couldn’t do. We added a few questions at the end to see how they found the overall feel and experience of the web app.

Some of the questions we asked included:

  • Can you find the filter by age? by category? by format?
  • Can you find the results once you have filtered?
  • Can you click on an opportunity to find out more?
  • Can you see information about the opportunity?
  • Can you get back to the list of results?
  • Can you clear all the filters?

Insights from the bug testing:

1. Digital natives are rapid bug testers. Group bug testing was a bit of a test for us, but we flew through the tasks and found lots of bugs. The young people enjoyed doing it too! For next time, we will slow it down a little to make sure everyone is on the same page/task.

2. Some of our design choices felt like bugs to users. For example, the initial listing page with all the available services is also temporarily our homepage. Some young people were confused by the page not changing and identified this as the button not working.

3. Bug testing helped bring out other feature changes and/or suggestions. The design choices that appeared to users as bugs, led to great conversations about what they expected to see and what was missing.

Have you got insights to share?

I would love to hear how others have done user-led bug testing!

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