Our application is designed to help people cultivate long-distance friendships. Specifically, our app uses flower/garden symbolism to represent taking care of a friendship. We plan to test how people generally use our app, how they add friends on the app, and what happens after they message friends outside the app.
Usability Test Discussion Guide & Script
Introduction
Hello, we are students in CS247B: Designing for Behavior Change, and we’re working on a project focused on long-distance friendships.
We’re here to get your feedback on new ideas for an application dedicated to cultivating long-distance friendships.
We have a prototype of one of the ideas to show you in its early stages to get your initial impressions, and we will give you some tasks to try out.
As we go through a task, I encourage you to think out loud. If anything is enjoyable or confusing, or you find something you love or don’t like, don’t hesitate to let me know. We want to know all your thoughts, so we encourage honesty! 🙂
I didn’t design this product, so you won’t hurt my feelings by sharing your honest feedback. My only goal today is to get your thoughts on what works and doesn’t work for you. We are not testing your ability to use the application but instead trying to measure its common roadblocks and intuitiveness. We’ll also have a few questions for you before and after the tasks.
If you are comfortable with it, we would like to record the study, and only our team will observe your interactions with our application as you click through it.
At any point in the study, you’re allowed to leave!
Study Warm-Up Questions – 5 min
What is helpful to know about them before they use the clickable prototype?
- Do you currently have any long-distance friendships?
- How would you describe the modality of your communications with friends?
- Are most in person? Via text? Via Instagram?
- What apps do you currently use to communicate with your friends? Does this differ for long-distance friends?
- Do they differ between the friend types?
- How does frequency differ?
- Do you have a favorite among these apps?
- How does that work for you right now?
- Are you satisfied with the apps you use right now?
- Are you the one usually initiating in your LDF contacts?
- Do you want to develop a habit of improving communication frequency and/or quality with your long-distance friends?
Scenarios & Prompts
- [general exploration] Imagine that you just installed a phone app that you heard helps you maintain long-distance friendships because your classmate recommended it. You’ve finished installing it, opened it up, and you’re free to explore:
- What catches your eye first?
- What do you think [current page] is for?
- [adding a friend] Imagine that Louis is one of your close, long-distance friends. You’ve decided to use the app to support your friendship with them. Show me how you would add this friendship as a flower to your garden.
- [just messaged a friend] Imagine that you just finished having an amazing, fulfilling conversation with your long-distance friend, and you want to see how the flower of your friendship has changed (*blossomed*).
That concludes our tasks! Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences with us. Before we move on to our wrap-up questions, do you have any questions about the application you just used?
Do you have anything else you want to explore on this prototype, or do you have any thoughts that you may have had that were unrelated to the tasks you were completing?
Wrap-Up Questions
- What did you find the most engaging about the application? What is your favorite feature?
- What feature might be missing in an app that represents your long-distance friends as flowers?
- Did you feel frustrated or confused at any point during the study?
General guidelines
- Keep track of any critical incidents where the participants encounter a negative experience
- Take note of comments that express emotions (positive/negative)
- Do not help a person accomplish a task unless they explicitly request clarification
- Do not interrupt a participant when they are sharing their thoughts
Prototype link: https://www.figma.com/file/RIpwcWfrHG1d5c9Xhvt8bJ/CS247B?type=design&node-id=115-1021&mode=design&t=loTdreZcO09UNPUJ-0
