Evaluation

Heuristic Evaluation

To ensure intuitive user experience and ease of use, we conducted a heuristic evaluation. We found the most prominent heuristic violations to be “Help with errors”, “User control and freedom” and “Does the UI need to provide a tutorial?”. With so many different pages, it can be difficult for users to easily navigate between features. Some pages lacked “back” buttons to leave the page they were on. We added in back arrows in the top right corner of each screen to give users the option to exit pages more easily. While not present in the prototype, in practice Page Friends would include a tutorial and error messages/troubleshooting resources.

On the other hand, our app maintained the standards for "Real world match", "Complex vs. minimalist design", and "Consistency and standards". The icons used throughout the app remain consistent and in accordance to universal iconography. The large buttons and typography are suited to stimulate and engage an elementary user base.

Usability Testing

To evaluate whether our app was suited for effective use with real users, we conducted two user tests utilizing the Wizard of Oz and paper prototyping methods. Through these tests, we gained crucial insights on what boosted and hindered the flow of our user experience. For simplicity, we omitted the onboarding flow and prioritized (1) Finding a way to read a book, (2) Adding a book to reading list, and (3) Collecting a character and meeting them in the town as our task scenarios. Our primary goals of these tests were to:

• Discover what keeps the user the most engaged

• What features work best and which are ignored

• Learn how intuitive the design really is

From our first user testing session, we learned that while the flow of the app was fairly intuitive, participants were left looking for features that we hadn’t considered before, like filtering for books within the library and a user profile. Our second user testing session went less smoothly, with users being able to complete the tasks with moderate ease but feeling overwhelmed by the amount of options on initial dashboard design. 

Taking into account the insights gained from these usability test sessions, we adjusted our low-fidelity prototype moving into development of the high-fidelity. The primary changes we made were simplifying the dashboard by combining the “My Books” and “Library” pages, the "Games" and "Town" pages, and implementing a filter feature in the Library.