Design Research 2021 Day 2 - Alana Wade & Serena Lai

Gloves in the time of Corona - Guerrilla Testing in a Pandemic How do you get real people to test a physical prototype during a pandemic? Alana Wade and Serena Lai, user researchers at the Digital Transformation Agency, will share their personal 2020 experiences. They needed to conduct research on a government device, testing a facial recognition feature to verify real people with real people. Something that couldn’t be done remotely. Their option? Guerrilla testing: brief face-to-face interactions with people going about their daily business. Alana and Serena will share the lessons they learned pivoting a project in May from in-depth in person research into a socially distanced feat of guerrilla testing. This includes adapting to quick changes, preparing for rapid testing and insight gathering, and how to build trust in seconds with passers-by when you have to remain distanced. This was also a real challenge for observation on devices!