Usability Report

Here’s our rankings for the issues we found:

Severe

1. Users were confused at the difference in functionality and terminology between daily challenges and community challenges. Users did not understand that daily challenges were personalized to be completed solo while community challenges were globalized prompts but you could invite your friend to complete them with you.

  • We plan to change the language of daily and community challenge to be more clear (daily and weekly global), while extending the invitation functionality to both daily and weekly global challenges, such that the only difference between the two challenges is that one is personalized and changes daily while the other is universalized and changes weekly (like an in-app holiday).

2. During the usability testing activity, we also saw that individuals found the challenge invite flow to be a bit confusing. In its original state, it was not exactly clear what it meant to send a challenge or to respond to one. When viewing one’s challenge invites, an arrow would appear next to each invite. Users however expressed that they were not sure what to expect if they were to click on this arrow.

  • Moving forward with our prototype, we plan to use a more distinct logo that will indicate to users that they will be responding to a challenge via text. 

 

Moderate

3. When we asked our users to look at what their friends in their community had accomplished and posted in the news feed, they felt confused as to the tasks that their friends actually accomplished. This told us that we needed to add clarity in each of the news feed posts and better indicate the completed challenge associated with each post.

  • Within the community news feed, we plan to make each post’s associated challenge a sub-header of the post. 

4. In the scope of an individual’s own profile page, we allow users to see a history of their own private and public logs. However, similar to the confusion regarding the news feed posts, our users found the logs displayed here to be a bit confusing as well. While the logs initially only displayed a user’s personal log of their experience, it made one of our users question whether logs were optional (as we intended them to be)–what if they hadn’t added any personal reflection to the log? Another user thought that this text was the challenge prompt itself and was confused as to how they could see their reflection associated with the log. We decided to restructure the format of the logs on the profile page as a result.

  • We plan to display the associated challenge prompt as the header of each log item, and the user’s personal reflection underneath it. In the interest of saving space, if the personal reflection goes on too long, we may cut it off with ellipses and make each log expandable so that the full reflection can be viewed.

 

Trivial

5. When marking a challenge as complete, we direct users to a completion screen where they can optionally add a reflection or other extra details to their experience. We failed to properly indicate that this addition is optional, however, and one of our users asked about it being a requirement.

  • To address this, we plan to add “(optional)” to the “Log your experience” line.

6. During the onboarding process, users were a bit confused about the ellipsis icon located in the toolbar. This icon was an artifact of iOS’s usual option to view additional settings/more info. This did not really make the most sense though in the context of onboarding.

  • We will remove this icon from our final prototype.

7. During the onboarding survey question soliciting transportation options, users were unclear at whether transportation options were multi-select or single select, and if it was single select, why users were forced to select only one (e.g: users can have access to multiple transportation options).

  • We plan to make it more explicit that the transportation options question is multi-select (adding ‘select all that apply’) and making the interactive prototype select multiple items.

8. During the onboarding survey question soliciting social identities and gender, some users were confused at why the information was relevant and were reluctant to share that information.

  • We plan to keep the questions relating to social identity because throughout our needfinding and literature review, we found that one’s cultural and social identity directly impacts one’s relationship to the outdoors. For example, in our literature review, we found that while parks in urban areas were typically seen as safe, leisurely spaces for middle/upper-class white women, they were often seen as dangerous, crime hotspots low-income women of color. In our onboarding, personalization profile, we solicit optional information on social identities in order to help the taskmaster and other users find people with similar identities to develop a sense of safety and comfort. However, we plan to add an information hover box explaining this context and reiterating that providing this info is optional.

9. When viewing one’s profile, users were a bit confused about the calendar icon. It was not clear that users are able to toggle between different views of their logs.

  • In our final prototype we will implement a clearer toggle to switch between profile views. 
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