User Testing Insights: How User-friendly is the Design?

An important and critical step in the UX Design process is User Testing. Before we moved too far in the design process, we conducted a usability test to determine if the app was an intuitive, valuable, and engaging user experience. 

We recruited and tested with participants that were both non-technical “amateurs” and technically-minded “professionals” in environmental data collection. During the session, we gave participants tasks to complete using the mobile app prototype and hardware prototype. We measured the user testing with the following metrics:

• Successful task completion: The percentage of task the participant completes
• Errors: The number of errors that occur while completing the task
• Time to complete task: The amount of time it takes the user to complete a task
• Task satisfaction: How the participant felt about the experience completing a task

Key insights we learned from the user testing:

• The FieldKit experience is a new paradigm for people who don’t have experience collecting environmental sensor data. The FieldKit experience and terms like “deployment”, “configuration” and “calibration” are not intuitive. The app needed more education and guidance for first time users
• It was confusing to take the user to the station page before completing the setup process. The hardware setup needed a clearer onboarding experience that concluded with a visible state change upon completion of setup to clearly show that the station was ready to deploy.
• There was some confusion with the concept of “recording” at the completion of the deployment. We needed a clearer way to introduce the concept of recording data as part of the deployment process, and indicate clearly when the station was not recording versus recording

Key UX Enhancements

• New app onboarding experience took the user through a more detailed setup showing images and on how to assemble and connect station
• We created a set by step calibration guide for each module
• A new design for the station page introducing the concept of recording data as part of the deployment process, and indicating clearly when the station was not recording versus recording