Goodreads Usability Test
Overview: Goodreads is an app that acts like social media for those that enjoy reading and want to track their and their peers, reading. For my Usability Testing class, I along with a team of my classmates conducted a usability test for the app and wrote a usability report.
For this project we created a Project Proposal, Test Plan, a Usability Report, and a List of Recommendations
Role: Team Lead
Duration: 5 weeks
Meet the Team
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Keya Mehta
Team Leader / UX Researcher
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John Grundorf
UX Researcher
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Thomas Burnett
UX Researcher
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Ashley Tyler
UX Researcher
INTRODUCTION
During my fall semester of 2022, my class and I were assigned the task of proposing a site or an app that we could then conduct a usability test for. As someone who had just recently rediscovered my love for reading this year and was using the Goodreads app pretty regularly, I knew Goodreads would be the perfect app to pitch. Thankfully, many of my classmates enjoyed reading, and knew the troubles of Goodreads, so my idea got picked. This led to me being team lead. As team lead, I was responsible for coordinating meetings, organizing workflow, and assisted my team members whenever they needed.
Test Plan
The first task we had after splitting into our teams was to create a test plan so we would know how we would go about this project. The team and I created a test plan in the format of a memo to the company behind our app, which was Amazon. In this test plan, we talked about timelines, how we would actually test, how many participants we would have, how we planned on tracking our information during the tests, and any other details necessary for the tests.
THE USABILITY TEST
For our usability test, we decided to use three methods. Think Aloud Protocol (TAP), Product Reaction Cards (PRC) and System Usability Scale (SUS). Each test in total took about 45 minutes to finish all 3 methods. In each test, one team member moderated while the other four facilitated. We each took turns moderating. We had 5 participants. The team and I made sure each participant had signed a consent form and had consented to the recording of the entire test.
Think Aloud Protocol
The think-aloud protocol is a technique used in cognitive psychology and user research. It involves a person verbalizing their thoughts and inner processes while performing a task or solving a problem. This method helps run gain insights into a person's thought processes as they went through the app. It also helped us understand the particpants’ decision-making, and problem-solving strategies by listening to their real-time commentary.
Product Reaction Cards
Product Reaction Cards are a list of 118 adjectives/adverbs that we had our participants pick 5 of after completing the 4 tasks. The picked cards gave us qualitative data on our participants overall experience while interacting with the app. Our two most popular cards were intuitive and useful.
System Usability Scale
The System Usability Scale is a ten item attitude Likert scale that gives global results on the app. This gave the team quantitative data on how each participant rated the Goodreads app. The SUS consisted of questions in which participants answered by strongly disagreeing to strongly agreeing.
FINDINGS
From our research, we were able to compile a comprehensive list of what issues needed to be fixed within the Goodreads app. We wrote these findings as well as an overview of our tests and their results in a research report.
Our findings were
Unclear links and buttons
No conformational cues
Confusing orders of books
Multiple search bards
No option to undo friend requests
SOLUTIONS
After we had completed all the contents of our report, we decided to formulate recommendations we could give to our client.
Our recommendations were:
Search bar should encompass users and books
Undo button for friend requests should be added
Confirmational cues should occur after changing any information of books, such as dates read, star ratings, and editions
Books should be in alphabetical order
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, I was able to learn alot from this project. This was the first project in my career that I had the most leeway in the decision process for the direction of the project. Everything was up to me, including the time line, the distribution of work, and how we would test, which was a new experience. It was definitely a challenge at times but I was able to gain a lot of value from the experience.
Some things that I would change if I could go back on the project now would be to:
Interview more users.
If we had the chance to interview more users we would have been more confident on our outliers.
Not guide the participants so quickly
For most of the team, this was the first time for many of us to conduct usability tests in person. When our participants were struggled during the tasks in TAP, I felt that the moderators were too quick to help, because they were subconsciously avoiding the awkward silence.
Ask more questions on the PRC choices of our participants.
Although we did note down any similarities or striking differences as well as count of each card chosen, it would have been nice to further ask why our participants chose specific cards we found interesting while writing the report that we looked over at the time of the test.