Summer Sprint 3: Conducting Usability Studies on Consumer & Merchant Apps
Welcome back to our third sprint of the summer semester!
As mentioned in our previous post, our next steps were to iterate on our consumer-facing app, test it, and test our merchant prototype.
Iterate on consumer apps
According to the feedback of user testing on the last prototype, we have consolidated features on the consumer app and updated each feature’s workflow. Then we created the info architecture by combining these workflows. We have determined four critical elements of the consumer app: Map, Recommendations, Social, and Profile.
Map: users can search and explore local businesses around them and access their business info through the map
Recommendations: Users can access all deals sent by local businesses and the ones coming from friends.
Social: users can see updates from stores they are following and posts from their friends.
Profile: users can edit their profile info, as well as top lists in each business category.
After confirming these features, we iterated on the design accordingly. We created a click-through prototype for a further usability test.
Conduct Think-Aloud Protocols and generate insights.
After we had iterated on the consumer app, we conducted think-aloud protocols on the new design.
Tested tasks : Prototype Tasks ( Including tasks and follow-up questions)
We conducted ten tests, with a variety of users. We analyzed the results , and came up with these key insights:
- Deal sharing & deal collection is the key value proposition of consumer app that most differentiates it from services like the yelp
- Deals (main competitive advantage) feels too hidden — users had issues sending deals to friends/ finding deals
- Sharing deals is limited to one screen, and users expected to be able to share places/ share deals from business page screens
- Feature of top lists was also hidden — when people searched for a business to put on the top list, they often look at the map first
- Users do not want to post to social feed → only wanted to see business’ posts
- All users preferred getting immediate savings, rather than cashback
- Deals were the main reason people would shop at a local business;
- To onboard more users, users should be able to share deals via FB/ Instagram messages to friends who might be interested in a deal from the store
Design changes
Based on the feedback, we came up with design changes and decided to keep iterating on key screens/features, which are Deal sharing, Feed, Profile/ Top Lists, and Business page. Here are the changes on each screen:
Deal sharing:
- Change verbiage from ‘recommendations’ to deals
- Make this page the home page
- Search bar + filter to search your deals
- See recs from merchants vs. seeing from friends
- Giving a list of ‘suggested friends’ to send deals to based on their preferences
- Show expiration date
- Some way for a user to organize the deals- delete/archive/organize into categories
Feed:
- Remove the user posts
- More detailed info about promotions
- Show users merchants that are recommended to them based on friends’ and their preferences (10–15%)
- Options to opt-out the rec
Profile / Top lists:
- Expand and collapse lists (esp when they have more than 1)
- When users create a new list, generate recs of places to add to list, and then they can edit & save
Business page:
- Able to share, follow (change bookmark icon to follow icon), and add to the top list
- Add contact info of business
- In promotions, can send deals (if any)
Merchant Prototype and Testing
Our team spent some of the week creating the refining the merchant prototypes so that they were ready for testing. We had 4 main features we wanted to test:
- Businesses can edit their profile information, including photos, tags, menu, etc…
2. Businesses can see how well their business is performing, including the traffic of new and returning customers, seeing business insights vs. industry insights, viewing the demographics of customer types, and receiving information about how often they appear on a top list.
3. Businesses also have the ability to create deals and view how well their deals are performing.
4. Finally, merchants can send specific messages to users that also appear on their social feed. This creates more of a connection between these two stakeholders, that feels less transactional.
Once these prototypes were ready to go, we put them up on Usertesting.com, and target 5 merchants: restaurants, and retail stores. We are still in the process of analyzing the results, but we wanted to see how useful merchants found these screens, and if there is anything else they might want.
Narrowing down our value proposition
Part of our capstone assignment this week was to create a Pecha Kucha- like presentation of our project. We were asked to pitch our idea to an executive, and focus on the main value propositions. This was definitely a great exercise for us, as we gathered some ideas about how to execute our final presentation. We gained invaluable feedback from both our faculty and our peers.
As you can see below, we created slides that were very image-heavy, because we wanted the audience to focus on what we were saying, rather than reading text on a page.
We definitely learned that we may want to focus more on the value of our solution, rather than the process of how we got there. In addition, since we have 2 products that we’re building, we should provide more information about how they compare to our competitors in the industry, such as Dosh, Rewards network, Rakuten, IHG, the PNC banking app, etc… It might be too much of an oversight to simply say that users struggle with those apps.
Next Steps
We’re in the final homestretch, with only 3 weeks until our final presentation! We’ll be diving deeper into some of our final deliverables, such as the client report, presentation, and website. We’ll also be working on developing a working prototype that we can hand off to the clients after we leave.
We’ll also be making final changes to our designs, and creating a roadmap of what our products could look like in the upcoming years. Until next time!
