Improving User Experience: A Heuristic Evaluation of the Ostello
The Ostello underwent a comprehensive usability assessment employing Jakob Nielsen’s renowned 10 usability heuristics. This evaluation aimed to pinpoint any existing usability issues and offer actionable recommendations for elevating the overall user experience.
Goal: Conduct a comprehensive assessment to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the product search, ordering, and delivery processes.
Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics
I will conduct the heuristic evaluation on the Ostello website, using Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics. The objective is to identify usability issues, provide better search recommendations, and improve the subscription flow to enhance the user experience. By applying these heuristics, we can uncover areas for improvement and offer practical solutions for a more user-friendly website.
Severity Ratings provide a way to assess the impact and urgency of usability issues
- 0: No violations found
- 1: Cosmetic problems only: Fix issues if time permits.
- 2: Minor usability problems: Fix issues at medium priority.
- 3: Major usability problems: Fix issues with high priority.
- 4: Usability catastrophe: Needs to be fixed urgently.
These ratings help prioritize the resolution of issues based on their severity and potential impact on the user experience. Higher severity ratings indicate more critical problems that require immediate attention and resolution, while lower ratings can be addressed at medium or low priority.
Evaluation Findings
After evaluating the Ostello website, we identified three key usability issues that could impact the user experience. Let’s dive into each of them:
1 ) User experience encountered when utilizing OTP (One-Time Password) verification: It is required that users wait 30 seconds after not receiving an OTP before resending it. This violates the user’s control and freedom.
Heuristic violated: YES, Severity Rating: 2
Solution: The UI should provide a close icon/button for resending the instant OTP.
2 ) Design and icons mismatch hampers user experience, causing confusion and frustration: Icons throughout the website need to be more consistent for example the search icon in the header is different in the About section, likewise the padding and margins are also mismatched throughout the website.
Heuristic violated: YES, Severity Rating: 1
Solution: Only use the same icons ibiary to remove the incosenticeny icons, and for padding and margins the designers need to fix manully.
3 ) Lack of navigation and UI indicators hinders user-friendly design:
Users can easily lose track of their location on the website when navigation links are not visually distinguished when active.
Heuristic violated: YES, Severity Rating: 1
Solution: Improve navigation with clear menus, icons, and intuitive UI indicators and when the nav-links are active give them better focus and bolded text.
4 ) Subscription management system disrupts customer experience:
Subscription dashboards are absent, and Users cannot unsubscribe from courses they’ve subscribed to.
Heuristic violated: YES, Severity Rating: 4
Solution: The website can include a subscription dashboard in the list of profile and also allow users to unsubscribe the course directly from the subscribe button and from subscription dashboard too.
Conclusion
Through a Usability Heuristic Evaluation of the Ostello website, we gained valuable insights into the user experience of this online course platform. Applying established usability heuristics allowed us to pinpoint key usability issues and suggest solutions to enhance the platform’s design, functionality, and overall user experience.
These findings underscore the significance of integrating usability principles throughout the design and development phases. Incorporating the suggested solutions will not only enhance the website’s overall usability but also result in increased user satisfaction.
Lessons learned
Through this evaluation, we have learned the significance of applying UX heuristics to evaluate and improve website usability. It highlights the value of ongoing learning and continuous improvement in the field of design.
Let’s remember that, as designers, we should always strive to create user-centric experiences by incorporating usability heuristics and conducting regular evaluations to refine our designs.