Background and Goals
This report evaluates the organization and intuitiveness of the 2013 Ford Fiesta interface’s structure, features, task flow, and navigation processes that may prevent users from effectively and efficiently reaching their goals. Goals for this project included:
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Understand who users of the Ford Fiesta Interface are and outline use and user assumptions
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Identify pain points and usability issues
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Uncover major issues, violations, and usability concerns
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Provide recommendations for improvements
Process
A multi-step process was used to gain an understanding of 2013 Ford Fiesta SE users and identify usability violations and issues:
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User and Expert Reviews and Usability Testing were conducted to form a better understanding of users’ needs, goals, pain points, dislikes, and how users interact with the Interface
Contextual Inquiry Methods
Contextual inquiry activities were vital to provide focus and context for the heuristic evaluation of the interface.
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User and Expert Reviews
The goal of User and Expert Reviews was to gain insights from professional, long-time, and new users of the interface to provide context and focus for the report highlighting users' needs and dislikes about the interface and its processes.
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Usability Exercise
The goal of the Usability Exercise was to gain insights on the learnability, intuitiveness, and usability concerns new users may face when performing common tasks.
Usability Principle-Based Analysis
The Principle-Based Analysis evaluated the interface against established usability heuristics and general usability guidelines set by experts in the field of human factors to help researchers and designers to improve product usability.
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Each principle was defined and shown, the violation and its impact were described, given a priority rating, and then provided with recommendations for improvement. For example, buttons that change meaning through the interface navigate the Consistency and Standards Principle.
Results of this analysis found the most impactful issues lead to poor navigation to major features and between screens, difficulty identifying where a user is in the interface, high user error, and increased abandonment of tasks. The major violated usability principles included:
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Conceptual Model
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Consistency and Standards
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Discoverability
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Feedback
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Visual Momentum
Interface Based-Analysis
The Interface-Based Analysis presented a screen-by-screen walkthrough of the Interfaces’ features and common user goals in order to highlight usability and task flow issues users may face. Each goal was presented, all screens related to the goal were examined, issues were described, recommendations for improvement were provided, then the navigation between screens and the overall usability of the goal was discussed. For example, the button screen location was confusing for users.
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Issues regarding menu or screen navigation presented the most severe issues that may lead to user errors or abandonment of tasks.
My Learnings
What I learned from this project:
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It is important to considering multiple user types, use cases or major tasks, and business objectives when evaluating a product to get a holistic view of it's usability
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The importance of using various inquiry methods to best understand the user bases and their pain points
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How to identify major usability concerns and how to properly implement usability principles through the use of multiple evaluation tools to increase knowledge of major usability concerns
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Poor usability of a product not only impacts the user but impacts the business objectives if there are other user-friendly alternatives on the market