Delhi Development Authority
Information Architecture Redesign
Disseminating the Elements of Pre-Attentive Processing:
Understanding Visual Perception through Psychophysics and the Neural Processing Mechanisms
Disseminating the Elements of Pre-Attentive Processing:
Understanding Visual Perception through Psychophysics and the Neural Processing Mechanisms
Actronika- A haptics company
Usability study
Actronika deals with high-definition haptics products. It's recent web redesign continued to have a high bounce rate.
The goal of this study was to evaluate the overall usability of the website, identify potential impediments for user goal completion, and to provide actionable recommendations for future development.
My Role
UX Researcher
Team of 5
Methods
Interviews, Expert Reviews, Usability test
Tools
User Zoom, Qualtrics,
Miro, Otter
Context
Actronika is a French company, offering state-of-art technology in haptics. Their clientele extends across industries such as automobile, mobile, gaming & VR as well as medical devices, consumer electronics, etc. The primary users of this website are business professionals, technical and otherwise, as well as academics involved in the field of haptics who are interested in the latest technology.
The website was recently redesigned but continued to have a high bounce rate. We, as a team of UX Researchers from Bentley Univ. were given the task of understanding how users engage with the website and identify impediments to end-user satisfaction.
Project goals
We defined the following project goals, in order to answer the above mentioned questions:
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Determine whether the brand positioning, product offering and value proposition are clear.
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Ensure that the website clearly describes what makes Actronika different from competitors.
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Find ways to enhance perceived credibility of the website.
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Evaluate whether the content of the website attracts and informs potential clients.
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Identify ways to increase the number of people who reach out to collaborate.
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Find ways to reduce the bounce rate of the website.
In order to achieve the projects goals we framed these research questions:
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How well does the site support the goals of the user?
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Is the desired information understandable and easy to find?
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Is the information convincing/credible?
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What obstacles do users encounter while trying to enact next steps through the website ?
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How do users feel about the actions required to get more information?
My Role
My role during this project was as a UX researcher on a team of 5. I was involved in each stage of the process, that included:
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Expert Review
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Participant screening and outreach
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Task list and moderator's guide
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Usability testing
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Data Analysis
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Presenting findings to the client
Methodology
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Define Goals
Expert Review
Participant Screener & Outreach
Framing tasks & scenarios
Icons source: undraw/illustrations
Data analysis
Setting up remote Usability test
Moderator's Guide
The Process
1. Expert Review
The purpose of the expert review was to do a cognitive walkthrough of the site as a prospective user and identify the usability issues that hinder the path of a user from accomplishing common tasks. The framework was based on usability review datasheet developed by Neil Turner, UX for the masses, a UK based user-centered designer & researcher.
The expert review was first conducted individually and then combined to create a group expert review. The findings for each heuristic was listed and prioritised based on the severity ratings. The list of prioritised findings helped determine the areas of the site that had room for improvement. These findings also gave the team insight into the areas we need to pay attention to during the usability testing.
Collaborative ratings
Overall performance rating
2. Participant screening and outreach
Prior to conducting the usability test, the team sent out a recruiting screener to identify the desired user group. In order to reach the target audience, the primary channels were:
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Social networks
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LinkedIn
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Personal network of professors, colleagues
Prospective participants were screened via an online survey built using Qualtrics. Those whose responses aligned with the test plan’s participant criteria were invited to participate in the study. Communication with participants happened mostly via email.
The team recruited a total of 12 participants, 6 males and 6 females between the age of 21-44. Most of the participants worked in industry, while two were academics.
3. Preparing task list & Moderator's Guide
Preparing a task list was a crucial aspect, during which we went through multiple iterations. We attempted to create tasks such that the user explores the site in full capacity and identifies the impediments to task completion. We framed scenarios such that it create a scenario in the user's mind before commencing the task. Next steps included developing a moderator guide, script for the session, consisting of introduction to the study, participant briefing, background questions, followed by scenarios and the corresponding 6 tasks. Task completion was followed up with post test questions and difficulty rating to collect quantitative and quantitative feedback.
4. Usability testing
The team conducted 12 usability sessions. Due to COVID-19, all sessions were held remotely using UserZoom video meeting platform. Each session was led by a moderator and minimum one observer/ note taker.
Participants completed 6 tasks over 1 hour test sessions and were encouraged to think aloud during task completion. Upon completion of each task, the moderator asked the participant a few post-task questions. Except for the first task, that was open-ended based on general key word search on the internet browser.The order of tasks 2-6 was counterbalanced to minimise the confounding effects of learning transfer between tasks.
Throughout the sessions, the observer took detailed notes based on a note-taking guide.
5. Data Analysis
After conducting 12 usability sessions, we analysed, synthesised our notes and extracted insights, representative quotes which were grouped based on the task. We then developed recommendations based on the extracted insights and grouped all the insights and quotes around the corresponding recommendation.
The recommendations were grouped based on four themes that emerged during this process:
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Content,
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Organization of Information,
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User Interface (UI) Design and
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Impressions and Sentiment
Miro board: Collaborative task analysis and synthesis led to 4 emerging themes
The findings and recommendations were rated based on the impact they have on the goals set for this project (Table 6). The final report, organised the findings and the recommendation based on 4 themes and arranged as per the priority of impact , High > Medium > Low.
6. Client Presentation
At at the end of the project, we created a presentation for the team at Actronika to communicate our findings as well as the recommendations.
Limitations and Challenges
Sampling Bias: The primary limitation of this study involved the quantity and quality of participants, due to challenges presented by both our lack of funding and highly specific user demographic. The majority of participants we were able to recruit for the study did not meet the ideal participant profile based on our evaluation of typical Actronika users. Most participants, while familiar with the term haptics, did not work in industries or positions connected to haptics technology or products. The usability test results then, skew heavily towards novice, rather than expert, users.
Results and Next Steps
The final report was presented to the stakeholders at Actronika. Our clients were very pleased with our findings and the actionable insights, both from the expert review and the usability test. Convinced by the depth of research, and supported evidence based on user's feedback, the clients made some of the high priority changes to their website right after the expert review and incorporated our final recommendations into their product roadmap.
If the team were to continue this project past the final deliverable, some next steps would include:
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Additional usability tests with accurate range of users (Executives and haptic experts)
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Evaluate the website within a specific geographical areas (Europe), as the client is based in Europe and most of their current customers base was in central Europe.
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Do competitive user testing to compare user's mental models and to provide additional insights to our client.