UX Research

Atmosfy Usability Test

Conducting Usability Tests and providing practical design implications based on collected data.
PROJECT OVERVIEW

To begin with - What is Atmosfy?

Atmosfy is a relatively new (less than 2 years) traveling application that helps people discover restaurants, experiences, and accommodations in the city.
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Atmosfy is not just helping people discover experiences, one of its biggest goals is to facilitate local business through the power of social media.
User
Travelers and People who dine out
These two groups used Afmosft to find spots and experience.
Pain Point
Problematic user flow, functions, and User Interface
Difficult to navigate between pages and find wanted information.
Goal
Streamline user flow and improve UI
Provide intuitive user experience and enhance efficiency.
Duration
4 months: 2023 Sep - 2024 Dec, Course Project
My Role
UX Researcher, UX Designer
BACKGROUND

It all starts with a trip to LA...

Me and my friends was plainning our Christmas and New Year trip to Los Angeles.
At first,
We thought it would be easy to make a wish list and search for travel information.
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Actually...
PROCESS

My Research and Design process to the goal.

LEARNING PRODUCT

What are the Product Values and Objectives?

To refine a product, it's essential to have a clear understanding of its objectives, the value it offers, and the key stakeholders involved. In order to identify the research goals and directions for Atmosfy, I took the following steps:
Personal Exploration
To get a firsthand experience of Atmosfy, I used the product myself. This allowed me to become familiar with its features, user interface, and overall functionality. This initial interaction gave me insights into the product's capabilities and potential.
External Insights
To gain a broader perspective, I watched a video featuring Atmosfy's CEO, Michale Ebel, and read his articles on LinkedIn. Mr. Ebel provided valuable insights into the vision and goals of Atmosfy, which helped me understand the product's purpose and business value.

Here are the Insights...

Product Vaule and Objectives
Atmosfy assists individuals in exploring various establishments such as restaurants, bars, and nightclubs by providing video reviews from customers who have visited these places. Additionally, it aims to promote and elevate local businesses, aiding them in gaining popularity and visibility
DEFINE STAKEHOLDERS AND RESEARCH GOALS

Who are Major Stakeholders - Application Users.

Atmosfy has several stakeholder groups with different goals such as application users, local business owners, and the Atmosy team itself.

This time, my concentration is application users, especially those who use Atmosfy to plan, travel, and find locations.

The reason I think users are the highest priority is because, for every social media, a large user base is the paramount element to help social media make a profit and become popular. More users mean more content and information being created which enriches social media and attracts more people to use.
Users' Goals
Go to good spots and have a good time by using Atmosfy.
Great features that are easy to use to find good places and plan trips smoothly.
Better UI and filters that help users browse applications and search locations efficiently.
My Research Goals
What user flow that participants feel challenging or unintuitive when they use the application?
What features are good but can be refined in the future?
What difficulties do users face when they find functions and navigate between pages?
Test Preparation

Preparation before starting the Usability Test.

Design Tasks
I tailored tasks to be user-centric, and the most commonly used function. There are two scenarios which are preparing for traveling and finding a nearby restaurant.
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These tasks helped me obtain qualitative and quantitative data from participants to conduct further analysis for feature redesign.

1. Search or discover places that you are interested in at LA.
2. Create a wishlist based on your search results for your vacation.
3. Find a restaurant that you do not know and are interested in.
4. Utilize the feature in Atmosfy to filter out only Japanese restaurants near your place.
5. Find the upload button to record a live video, edit the post, and upload.
Recruitment Plan & Participants' Screening
Atmosfy is an application on the phone, so it is difficult to conduct the usability test remotely. Moreover, data quality and efficiency would be better by doing tests in person. Due to resource limitations, I selected personal contact as my recruitment method.
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Ideally, I consider Interested Group to be a better option. Compared to personal contact the data I collect will be less biased and will not come from specific types of people.
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Next, Atmosfy's features are targeted to users who travel and dine out. It doesn't make sense if participants seldom do these activities. To make the results more precise, I prepared a screening questionnaire with the below conditions.

1. Age: 18-50 
2. Traveling frequency: once a year
3. Dining out frequency: 3 times a month
4. Previous experience: At least used 1 social media
5. Occupation: not a tour guide 
Moderator Guide
To standardize the usability test process, I drew up a moderator guide. It includes all the important information and steps that moderators should follow during a usability test.
Usability test and results

These are Results I got from the tests.

Task Success Rate and Time on Test
I used Task Success Rate and Time on Task as my metrics to measure the outcome.

Task success rate provides data if users can navigate to corresponding pages and find the correct functions.

Even if participants complete tasks successfully, it does not mean the process is perfect.

Time on tasks gives me insight into whether the user flow and the UI are intuitive. It is helpful to understand why participants spend more time on specific tasks. Is it because of the navigation issue between pages, functions are hard to find, or any other problems?
Discovered Issues
DESIGN Implication

Ta-da -
Design Implication for issues.

Cannot create a wish list while saving places
When users save a place, instead of asking what lists users want to save the bookmark in the created wish list or create a new one, Atmosfy only changes the color of the save button.

Users have to go to the profile page to create a new list and add previously saved bookmarks manually. This user flow is not intuitive. 
Design Implications
When users save bookmarks, Instead of just putting them into the bookmark category, show an additional overlay that has options to ask if users want to create a new list or save bookmarks into an existing list.
Alternative design by Youtube Music
Alternative design by Google Maps
Expected search results are not appearing
Participants searched some extremely famous locations by search bar, but the expected results were not shown.

The search engine needs to be optimized. For instance, when participants typed in LA, it didn’t show Los Angeles. Yet, people often call it LA. It seems the search engine shows places that start with la.
Design Implications
Optimize the search engine and aim for the most common results that users normally want.
Unclear floating buttons
Floating buttons are blocking the content. If the background color is alike, the buttons will be unclear.
Design Implications
Storge them in an expandable list to save space on the page. Add background color to the list so buttons can always show clearly.
Alternative design by me
Cannot unmute by cellphone volume button
Users cannot unmute video by pressing the cellphone volume button. They have to click the speaker icon on the screen to unmute it.
Design Implications
Connect the application mute function with the physical cellphone volume button.
The pins on the map page are tiny
Participants reported that places' pins on the map page are too small which makes it difficult to select. Moreover, users cannot tell the types of places by small pink dots.
Design Implications
Enlarge pins and turn them into different icons. Use different icons to represent types of the places. For example, restaurants, hotels, and bars.
Alternative design by Google Maps
Countless filter labels
The filter page has over 160 labels which makes participants difficult to find the particular filter.
Design Implications
Conduct card sorting to create a hierarchy for labels, and minimize the labels that show at once on the page.
Recording videos does not replay automatically
When participants finished recording the video, they had to click the play button on the screen to watch their recording. This causes an extra step for users.
Design Implications
Allow users to upload photos instead of asking them to record videos that are at least 4 seconds long. Lots of places and food only need a couple of pictures to introduce.
Recording videos does not replay automatically
Users cannot unmute video by pressing the cellphone volume button. They have to click the speaker icon on the screen to unmute it.
Design Implications
Change the replay pattern, making the video keep repeating while users finish recording. When users put their finger on the screen, the video stops temporarily for a moment.
KEY TAKEAWAYS

What I have learned from this project.

Develop a deep understanding of users' perspectives and empathize with their experiences.
Even if functions work, that does not mean the user experience is perfect. Inconvenience issues heavily rely on users' feedback.

Making good use of think-out-loud, post-task, and post-test questions can help researchers obtain useful qualitative data to empathize.
Provide actionable solutions that can guide the development team in making improvements.
After the usability test, we do not just want to realize what functions go well or what features are problematic.

The more important thing is how to solve those issues. Providing practical design implications is paramount to improving the user experience in the future.
Identify issues sooner to prevent costly changes later in the process.
Atmosfy is a relatively new application compared to several applications. I believe some common UI or UX patterns can be leveraged from applications such as Google Maps and YouTube. Some Issues I discovered with usability should have been known before the product release.

‍Internal assessment is important to prevent additional costs for changing. Moreover, releasing questionable products will give customers a bad first impression.

Thank you for reading!
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© Mickey Chen 2023