Methodology
We rated all our recommendations and problems on a severity scale of 1-4.
Issues that directly hurt the usability and were antithetical to what the product stands for, were assigned a severity rating of 4. For example, a user commented on the onboarding illustrations not being inclusive of all cultures which directly contradicts the aim of this product. For severity rating 2 and 3, we looked at problems that were less of a usability threat but gave us new ways of looking at the same functionality and how they could be improved. Some of these were also considerations that we had in mind initially but were later confirmed via usability tests.
The lowest usability rating was assigned to issues that did not seem to pose any threat to the app's usability, and were moreover, opinions that could not be substantiated without more testing. For example, one user expressed that the font family for the content should've been different. We don't see this affecting the overall user experience of the product, and so we call it a cosmetic problem that do not require fixing.
4 = Usability catastrophe: imperative to fix this before product can be released
3 = Major usability problem: important to fix, so should be given high priority
2 = Minor usability problem: fixing this should be given low priority
1 = Cosmetic problem only: need not be fixed unless extra time is available on project
Improvements
Task 1 - Onboarding
Users would like to see a guest login option.
Have a more inclusive illustration
Participant feels the welcome in the serif font does not go well with the rest of the design
The screen now features a more inclusive illustration and also allows users to login as a guest without signing up.
Test result yielded the finding that the onboarding pages slide too fast, and users are unable to read everything on that page in that span.
Have a more inclusive illustration
Increased the time delay between onboarding screen change to allow people to comfortably read the featured content.
The micro-interaction of the slider is not intuitive and as usable as we initially thought. Some users also pointed that it is not very inclusive as families can be very diverse. We would be changing this to a simpler slider
Family can be renamed to Household
The initially used word family renamed to ‘Household’ as participants feel people, like students, also live with others who may not be related and can still use the app together.
Changed the design of the slider to a simpler option that is more intuitive and also provided a tooltip to facilitate ease of use.
Results suggest that this section should be posed as a two part question, as the size of the family (asked on the screen before) cannot imply that there is a child in the household. So first one must ask if they have children, followed by asking the age of the child.
As the participants pointed out that the size of the family cannot imply that there is a child in the household, we also realized that as we are specifying it as a household opposed to a family the children too may not necessarily be related. One can choose to educate a child that may not be their own. Hence we carefully reworded our queries to be more sensitive to the people that may use this app. And since the purpose of the app is gauge how young the child might be to curate content according, we simply ask the age of the youngest.
Task 2 - Doing an activity
Play icon could be replaced by the triangle-like icon that is often associated with it, to make it more intuitive
Make the “play” button more intuitive by using a triangle button
Participants would like to go back and forth on steps using this trail
Users would like this to be ticked only when they confirm that the step is done
User doesn’t expect this button to appear
Add numbers in the buttons so they are more clickable. Also make the tick button null so user will tick it when finish a task.
Need to integrate more options to the picture posting UI such as the ability to retake post, save as draft, edit / change or discard photo before posting
Open the camera app directly to be able to use all it's functionalities while taking a photo
Miscellaneous
One of the user suggested that instead of capturing one photo at the end, give an option to capture and document each step and create an album of the activity
Participants would like to go back and forth on steps using this trail
Users would like this to be ticked only when they confirm that the step is done
User doesn’t expect this button to appear
Add numbers in the buttons so they are more clickable. Also make the tick button null so user will tick it when finish a task.
Milestone 7: Improvements from Tests
Brief - Improve your prototype based on the results of milestone 6 explaining what you did.