Key findings
Who we tested
We tested with two Stanford students.
Participant 1: masters student, male, sunscreen wearer.
Participant 2: student, female, only wears sunscreen when outdoors for long periods of time
Tasks
To see what tasks and how we ran through them, see this blog post:
https://highercommonsense.com/cs247b/team-13-9b-prototype-and-usability-script/
Results
Severe Usability Problems
- The onboarding process has several steps that are discouraging, without clear explanation for why some of the steps are needed or at least heavily suggested. When it comes to choosing settings (contacts, notifications), there is poor signaling for how a user can opt out.
- Fix: We will add more explanation and context for why we are asking users to perform certain actions (ie why do we need them to sync contacts / enable notifications?) on the pages where we ask them to do it
- The friend’s plant info has a lot of text that is overwhelming and blends together. The text itself does not provide meaningful information about their friend’s habit behavior. It was also unclear why what the reminders were for at first.
- Fix: We will add some more context to the friend’s plant info page about when and why they should notify their friends
- One possible way we were thinking of providing information about their friend’s habit behavior was showing a visualization of how often they were wearing sunscreen (perhaps using a chain metaphor?)
- Another option might be a one time tutorial / walkthrough
- Fix: We will add some more context to the friend’s plant info page about when and why they should notify their friends
- The location of buttons at the top of the page are hard to identify and reach as well as not being in an intuitive place to navigate. (referring to the top nav buttons on the customization screen)
- Fix: we will modify the button positions/ colors to make them stand out more
- The toggle button’s (on the garden/friends page) location and type faded in with the rest of the screen and does not have indication for what it does.
- Fix: Add text to indicate what the toggle function is meant to do OR use a different method to switch between the garden and list views
- We will experiment with both options and see what is better
Moderate Usability Problems
- The garden page has poor color contrast and so the pots, shovel, and x buttons faded into the first page background.
- Fix: We will change the garden page background image, and change the empty pot i.e. add a friend pot to a different color so it is easily recognizable.
- Onboarding does not ask for skin type but this information is in friend profiles, so this is something we either need to add to onboarding or remove from friend profiles. On one hand, removing it from onboarding makes it quicker for users to go to the Garden screen; however, it might be nice to see what skin type your friend has to contextualize the sunscreen brand they are using.
- Fix: We will add in an optional (skippable) step to enter their skin type profile; this will allow users to decide how much effort they want to put in
- Onboarding feels very long currently
- Fix: Will make plant customization optional in onboarding so users can skip it
- There is currently no way to see when was the last time you notified a friend.
- Fix: Instead of adding a complex feature, we plan to embed a 24-hour time element to the send notification to friend button, so you can only send a notification once every 24 hours.
Trivial Usability Problems
- The buttons to sign in via Apple and Google do not link to a sign-on page that users would expect.
- Fix: will add a short screen to the final prototype with a mockup of Apple/Google Signup pages
- Clicking things in the edit garden page is buggy.
- Fix: Will adjust the prototype wiring for our final submission
- It’s not clear what is editable in the profile page
- Fix: Add a pencil icon somewhere to indicate what is editable and what is not
- No ‘back’ button on the screen that says ‘Ta-da!’
- Fix: We will add a button and wire it up in the prototype
