Methods used to demonstrate the redesign were HTML mockups, also called wireframes, which look like an actual website but are not connected to back-end systems. These wireframes were used to validate the redesign by expert opinion, using semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire afterwards.
8.2.1 DEMONSTRATION THROUGH HTML MOCKUPS
To show that the redesign meets its solution objectives, it could be demonstrated and tested with actual customers in a real-life situation, where customers want to use the services that were redesigned. This could be done by implementing the redesign into the current NS website and letting customers try and use the redesigned service using e.g. A/B-testing. Unfortunately, this is not possible in this research because of time and permission constraints. It would take too much time to fully develop, test and implement this redesign into the NS IT infrastructure. Furthermore, there needs to be permission from higher management to do this, which they will probably not give.
Therefore, mockups were made that look like an actual working website with interactive elements. This simulates the redesigned services with about the same user experience, but costs far less time. It is also one of the methods mentioned by Wieringa for making a validation model (Wieringa, 2010). Mockups were made using the tool Axure (http://www.axure.com), which was chosen because of the low effort needed to make appealing and working wireframes in HTML, its possibility to host them online and the fact that it was free for university students. The uploaded wireframes can be found at http://tiny.cc/personalizeNS. An example of a wireframe can be seen in Figure 27 and other screenshots can be found in Appendix E. The wireframes are in Dutch because of the primary use being internal validation.
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Figure 27 – Screenshot from HTML wireframe
These wireframes can be demonstrated and evaluated by showing them to NS customers and asking those customers what they think of the redesign, e.g. through an online questionnaire or through the NS customer panel. However, the redesign and the idea behind it, step-up authentication, are not easily understood by customers who do not have much experience with NS and its services. Also, to give a good understanding of the idea, the respondents would have to think like other types of customers, which is quite hard for people in an online questionnaire. An online questionnaire would thus probably not carry trustworthy results.
8.2.2 VALIDATION THROUGH EXPERT OPINION
Wieringa (2010) defines four methods for treatment validation: expert opinion, single-case mechanism experiment, technical action research and statistical difference-making experiment. The last three methods validate the solution by actually implementing it into a problem context and collecting the results from what happens. The first method, expert opinion, does not do this and lets experts imagine what would happen if the solution would be implemented into the problem context it was designed for.
From the four treatment validation methods defined by Wieringa (2010), only expert opinion remains as a viable option for this research. The other three cannot be carried out because an actual implementation and test with customers will cost too much time and will probably yield less trustworthy results. Therefore, expert opinion is chosen to validate the redesign. Twelve employees of NS were asked as experts, because of their high experience with services of NS and their ability to imagine how different types of customers, the types defined as personas, perceive those services. Experts from specific fields and with backgrounds were selected, among others from Customer Service, Fraud Detection, Marketing and Change Management. Also, some experts were selected because they did not have any relationship to this subject matter and have an unbiased view. For an overview of all spoken experts from inside NS, see Appendix D.
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8.2.3 INTERVIEWS AND QUESTIONNAIRE
Asking experts about their opinions can take place in interviews. Three types of interviews can be defined: structured, semi-structured and unstructured interviews (Bernard, 1988). Semi-structured interviews are most suitable for the expert interviews in this research, because they provide the possibility to interview experts about certain topics that are fixed, while still being able to pursue topical trajectories that also seem interesting (Cohen & Crabtree, 2006). The interviews can take place in an individual or a group setting. In this research, an individual setting has been chosen, to ensure that experts can give their own opinion and are not distracted by others. The interviews, together with the redesign demonstrations, were set up in six phases, as follows:
1. Introduction of the general idea: layered authentication in three steps 2. Demonstration of the travel history and card information service 3. Demonstration of the refund with delay service
4. Validation questions about the redesigned services, derived from the hypotheses
5. Validation questions about the general idea of layered authentication and related subjects, derived from the hypotheses
In the interviews, experts mentioned some new points which needed to be verified against other experts’ opinions, to see if there was consensus among the experts about those subjects. Also, the hypotheses needed to be quantified. For this, a questionnaire was set up and sent to the experts after the interviews had taken place. A detailed account of the interview setup, as well as the questions and answers from the questionnaire can be found in Appendix F.