VALIDATION
User Testing
- Task 1: Complete Onboarding
- Task 2: Search for Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe
- Task 3: Complete full recipe flow
Testing with 5 adult users and 2 child users helped revealed the following key themes:
1. Making the app more kid friendly There were some safety concerns with certain steps not seeing appropriate for children such as using an oven. Additionally a wish for more occasions to celebrate.
2. Discoverability issues came up such as determining what the yield button would do and finding the achievements page.
3. Opportunities to design a more seamless experience by increasing user control and navigation within the app as well as addressing the need for a welcome page.
Design Decisions
A concern for safety in the kitchen came up around certain steps such as using an oven or a stove. This fear was ameliorated by adding bright Adult and Child to indicate which user should carry out a specific step.
Adding tasting, award and achievement pages helped to increase the child's engagement in using the app.
Adding a timer during steps which required waiting helped managed impatient little ones expectations.
Users were unable to discover and therefore understand several capabilities of the app. The recipe yield button which helped user adjust the yield prior to beginning was difficult to notice.
The Achievements page which holds all the earned badges was not easy to find
The step for refrigerating the cookie dough was also lost upon the users.
The addition of discovery bubbles helped to guide the user to what certain features hold when they are first exposed to them.
The shift out of the recipe flow helped draw the users attention to the freezing step option.
It was observed that 4 out of 5 users found the landing page to be abrupt. When further questioned, they expressed an expectation of encountering a welcome or explanation screen before being directed to the landing page.
This feedback contradicted the conventional approach taken by most recipe apps. However, it is worth noting that in the subsequent round of usability testing, this unconventional landing page approach was positively received.
Overall users were very pleased with the decision decisions from the previous iteration.
The following adjustments were suggested in the second round of testing:
- 1. Managing user control and clicking fatigue - users were getting tired of clicking too many buttons when the stars were popping up on the screen. They also felts like they were getting interrupted in their flow when a separate page was showing up for stars.
- 2. Reducing the need for training by having icons be more self-explanatory.
- 3. There was some confusion with the navigation bar especially with regard to the favorites button which users commented "looked like a ghost." The purposed of the store button was also unclear.
Instead of having a separate page for the stars which causes the users to sometimes loose their place in the recipe and also get annoyed with clicking to exit. I designed a star which would automatically appear on the page when the next button was pressed.
I removed the need of unnecessary instructions by making buttons more self explanatory. Making a switch from "Steps" and "Instructions" to "View all Step" and "View all Instructions"
User testing showed that several icons were causing confusion. Users did not automatically understand that the "chef hat" logo was going to navigate to the awards page. The hamburger menu in the corner had no functional need so was removed. Finally the favorites icon looked like a ghost to some users. They said they were used to seeing heard for favorites. Additionally it did not seem critical to have the favorited button on the main navigation bar so I removed it for this phase of the project and reprioritized the badges page. The store button was also confusion since I had not built those pages as yet.
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