USER TESTING
Summary
For our user testing process, we focus on the 4 main user journeys that we have on our application. The first 2 user journeys are related to creating the contents on our app, i.e., the travel guides and the itineraries. This involves figuring out how to actually land on the page which has the form to create the contents, and making the contents itself. The second set of 2 user journeys are related to exploring these contents, which involves locating the destinations that they want to go to, follow the navigation by the application and use the contents. At the end of every user journey, there are 2 types of feedback that we are collecting: general feedback (feedback that they would've said without us asking questions prior) and questionnaire-based questions. The general feedback are used to give us idea about what features to add and/or improve. The questionnaire is used to give us a broader idea about how our app perform in terms of each user journey. For the participants, we have in total 5 DkIT students who are the participants for the user testing process.
Participants Demographics
- Gender: we have 3 females and 2 males
- Age: we have 2 participants aged 21 years old, 2 participants aged 20 years old and 1 participant aged 22 years old.
- Tech savvy-ness: All of the participants are tech-savvy
Time of Exercise
We did this testing in the week beginning 24 April 2023.
USER JOURNEY 1 - CREATING TRAVEL GUIDE
Method
We give the participants a phone with the application installed, and then we asked them to create a travel guide without specifically telling them where the create button is and which fields or button to pay attention to.
General Feedback
- It's quite difficult to know which page the user is currently in, particularly because the bottom navigator doesn't change its appearance indicating which page is currently on focus.
- There are no notifications / information box that tells the users what is going to happen after they submit their travel guide application.
Questionnaire
- From the scale of 1 - 5, rate the difficulty of creating a travel guide on Guidify
- From the scale of 1 - 5, rate the level of information sufficiency provided by the app throughout the flow.
From the questionnaire, we can see that none of the participants think that creating a travel guide is hard. However, we do notice that there is still 1 participant that thinks that it's not that easy either. After further research, we found that this correlates with the general feedback, which is that the bottom navigation doesn't signify page changes and there's also a lack of information after creating a travel guide.
From this questionnaire, we see that there's a lot of participants who were not satisfied with the amount of information provided in the application. After further research, this was mainly because they were looking for their travel guides after they submitted the application. The problem was that the application doesn't provide anything related to this.
Improvements based on results
- Regarding the lack of signal by the bottom navigator, we decided to have 2 different icons representing each page. 1 icon is used when the page is active (i.e., the user is currently on that page) and 1 when the page is not active
- Regarding the lack of information provided when creating a travel guide, we decided to display some kind of alert to the user letting them know that their application will be reviewed.
USER JOURNEY 2 - Exploring Travel Guides
Method
Similar to user journey 1, we gave a phone with Guidify already installed to it. However this time, we asked the participant to figure out how to go to O'Fiaich College from DkIT using the app, and listen to the travel guide when they have arrived (i.e., follow the navigation)
General Feedback
- Currently, users would need to look back and forth between the app and their surroundings in order to read the directions from the app while following the navigation. However, since the app's goal is to provide a more immersive experience in travelling, perhaps this app should adopt Google Maps' way of being able to give directions when during navigation via audio.
- The UI/UX of finding a travel guide (specifically related to O'Fiaich College) in this case is very good
Questionnaire
- From the scale of 1 - 5, rate the difficulty of locating the destination on Guidify
- From the scale of 1 - 5, rate the difficulty level of finding travel guides related to the destination.
- From the scale of 1 - 5, rate the difficulty level of navigating to the destination.
- From the scale of 1 - 5, rate the overall quality of experience for exploring the travel guide.
From this chart, we can see that none of the participants felt like that the process of locating the destination on Guidify (in this case, O'Fiaich College) is hard. After further research, this was because the fact that we provide the ability for users to search for location names, and also simply drag the map around so they can see what's nearby them, and fortunately, O'Fiaich college is very near to DkIT, hence, easy to locate.
Similar to the answer of the previous question, we can see that there's also no participants that think that the process of finding related travel guides of a location to be hard. This is because our UI clearly shows the related travel guides (And also itineraries) of a location.
For this question, we noticed that there's a participant who thinks that following the navigation is not that easy. After further questioning, the problem seems to be that they have to keep recentering the position of the map in the application. If they don't, they will simply lose their blue marker in the map that signifies their current position. We corrected this as an improvement to this user journey afterwards.
For this question, we noticed that there's a person that thinks that the overall quality is neutral. After asking them about this, they said that the navigation could be more improved by adding an audio that would dictate the directions that the user takes. This is similar to how Google Maps work, which is giving directions to users both using text and audio. This also correlates with the app's goal, which is to make the experience more immersive (instead of having the users to keep switching between the app on their phone and their surroundings).
Improvements based on results
- Regarding the re-centering problem of the map (the map doesn't recenter automatically), we decided to fix this problem as an improvement for the user journey
- Regarding the suggestion to add the navigation audio guide, we decide that this could be an important future work. However, we don't have the time resource to do this at this point.
USER JOURNEY 3 - Creating Itineraries
Method
The method for this user journey is similar to the first user journey. We asked the participants to create an itinerary. We didn't give any specifications on which locations should be in the itinerary.
General Feedback
- The only entry point to creating an itinerary was a button on User page. The problem is that in order to create an itinerary, users need to know at least a name of the travel guide that they want to put in the itinerary. Having only 1 entry point means that users would need to memorise the name of a travel guide that they want to enter into an itinerary. This would be easy if an itinerary only has 1 travel guide. However, the reality is that itinerary tends to have multiple travel guides. Because of this, the participants felt like it would be good to have a feature where users can press on a travel guide that they currently see and put it in an itinerary (similar to how we can choose a song on Spotify and put it into an existing playlist). This way, user can start by creating an itinerary with an empty travel guide, then iteratively add more travel guides.
Questionnaire
- From the scale of 1 - 5, rate the difficulty of creating an itinerary
- From the scale of 1 - 5, rate the level of information sufficiency provided by the app throughout the flow.
For this question, there are some participants that didn't think that the process of creating an itinerary as easy. The reason was the problem mentioned in the general feedback section of this user journey.
Overall, we can see that all the participants think that there is enough information to help users to create itineraries
Improvements based on results
- Regarding the feedback about having a direct link from a travel guide component in the UI to a page to create the itinerary, we plan to place this task as a task for the future since we don't have the time resource for now.
USER JOURNEY 4 - Exploring an itinerary
Method
For this user journey, we asked the participants to explore an itinerary that contains PJ Caroll building and O'Fiaich College. However, we don't give any specific instructions on how to do it, similar to the previous user journeys.
General Feedback
- Similar to the travel guide exploration, overall, the participants felt like an audio navigation guide would be useful.
- Related to the instruction given to the participants, the participants felt like if there's a specific page that would help participants to find itineraries that contain a set of given locations, it would help them a lot.
Questionnaire
- From the scale of 1 - 5, rate the difficulty level of finding the itineraries that contain some locations
- From the scale of 1 - 5, rate the difficulty level of navigating to the destinations
- From the scale of 1 - 5, rate the overall quality of experience for exploring itinerary
For this question, some participants didn't think that it's that easy to locate an itinerary given a set of locations (O'Fiaich college and PJ Carroll). This correlates to the general feedback for this user journey, which is that they need some kind of a helper page that would directly point them to the itineraries that contain the set of given locations.
Similar to navigating to a location travel guide-wise, some participants still need an audio that would guide them instead of having to look back and forth between the app and the surroundings.
Overall, we can see that the participants in general feel that the experience of exploring itineraries classify as a good experience.