Optimum Assesment Platform: The ultimate assessment experience.
My name is Eerk Hofmeester, product owner at Optimum Assessment. For 8 years I have been involved in digital testing and learning. However, helping to realize customer needs is something I have been doing for 38 years. I have held a variety of roles over the years. Designer, functional and process architect, business analyst and now product owner. Within the latter role, I translate customer requirements into innovations and improvements to our testing platform. The main goal? Delivering as much value as possible for our customers!
Optimum Assessment aims to provide the ultimate testing experience and thus optimally tailor its platform to the needs of all its users. However, as a developer of our own platform, we do not have infinite capacity. We cannot make all the improvements at once and must make choices and prioritize. As a product owner, I help our organization set these priorities based on the highest possible value for as many of our customers as possible. How? By knowing in detail what our customers need.
When I say “customer,” I always mean the end user. That is, of course, to begin with, the candidate `who wants to take a test that is important to him or her in a pleasant way and without any hindrance. But also consider the item and test constructor who wants to create high-quality tests as easily as possible. Then there is the psychometrician who, based on the data from tests taken, wants to improve the quality of the tests and individual items. Finally, the supervisor needs information about the orderly conduct of a test or examination. Optimum Supervisor’ s dashboard provides real-time information for these purposes.
Optimum Assessment’s existing knowledge and years of experience in the testing domain helps us make choices in all these scenarios. However, experience tells us that it is only when the end user actually uses a new feature that it becomes apparent whether it is what he or she needs.
Therefore, we involve users as early as possible in the development process. In fact, before even a line of code is written, we speak at length with our users about a new option. Is it even necessary? How does that work in practice? Where does it actually hurt? The latter may sound strange, but I often see that it is precisely in describing current problems that new insights arise to perhaps do things quite differently than we intended.
Then once the initial sketches and ideas are developed, we go back to those users. Is this what you meant? Would this work? What could be better? Etc.
Only then do our development teams get to work building a new feature step by step. We also share the intermediate steps with our clients and can actually be used by them. At Optimum Assessment, we work through an agile methodology. This gives us continuous feedback on whether we are on the right track and we make adjustments if needed. On the contrary, the fact that we sometimes end up with a different end result than previously conceived is a positive thing. Apparently, that outcome better aligns with what users want and provides more value than the original plan.
Of course, the work does not end there. Our testing platform helps large groups of users create, administer, assess and improve tests. In practice, even the smallest blemishes come to light naturally. So we continue to listen to comments from users about things that could be even better, easier, faster or more convenient, and incorporate them into the next version.
Thus the circle of product development is complete again!
Precisely in describing current problems, new insights arise to perhaps do things very differently than we intended.
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