Live Intercept Testing

Conduct usability testing and other UX research with actual visitors to your site — while they’re on your site.

Featured Story:

Uncovering the real reasons visitors aren’t buying online

Challenge

“Why are so many people who get an online quote from us not buying online?” That’s what the product team at a Fortune 500 financial company wanted to understand.

Action

While lab usability testing helped, intercepting and testing with real visitors already in the quote flow gave us our best insights.

Result

The product team designed a radically different quote page that addressed the questions we heard directly from users on that page.

The missed links: catching a color UX issue with live intercepts

  • The marketing team at an industrial manufacturer had just relaunched their site’s product pages. Web sales were underperforming expectations.
  • We recruited 5 target customers as they entered the site’s product section, and conducted 30-minute observation sessions with each one. 
  • The biggest finding: 3 of 5 users overlooked critical links due to poor color contrast. Within weeks the team fixed the problem.

Uncovering a legalese roadblock by intercepting insurance claimants

  • Many customers of a large auto insurer started to report their accident claims online, but then called to finish. Management wanted to reduce costs by keeping them online.
  • We recruited 8 customers for 1:1 moderated sessions just as they started to report their claim online. We quickly called them and asked them to continue the claims process and think aloud. 
  • By talking to real people who’d just been in an accident, we learned a ton. Our biggest insight: strong legal disclaimer language near the start of the flow scared already-fragile users and made them want to talk to someone.

Inspiring bill-pay usability fixes by watching real-world frustration

  • An enterprise company with a subscription business model wanted to remove friction from its online payment flows. 
  • Simulating a bill payment scenario in a usability lab is tough. So we grabbed real customers just as they were logging into their accounts. 
  • Motivated by the frustration they saw from real users, the product team fixed 6 payment-related usability issues in their next release.