Visual Cue Usability Test
About the Project
Digital Sales is one of the key modules of AOS digital system. Among all the sections in the Digital Sales module, Sales Workspace is a dashboard that works as a control center to manage all the attributes like rates, impressions, unit ratings, and CPMs of selected products. For digital advertising clients, they are actively using AOS sales workspace from time to time, so it becomes crucial to understand how workspace users are tackling the task and what design changes we can make to improve their user experiences.
Team
Operative Product Strategy Team
Design Practices
Design Researches
A/B Testing
Feedback Analysis
Research Presentation
User Testing Project
Design Duration
October 2021
Resources
BACKGROUND
This is part of the client-oriented project which became the key documentation for the Operative product strategy team to gain a deeper understanding of our main client - FOX marketing user's needs and their expectations. Several Usability tests were conducted with external users during the research project, which finally become a valuable resource to discover product flaws as well as areas of progress.
The visual cue usability research mainly focused on the findings of the usability testing regarding the interface design within the sales workspace - including the visual cues of several modules like pre-empted spots, constraints, rates and ratings and price breaks, etc.
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TESTING GOALS
Identify usability issues with the workspace visual cues.
The user Interface makes up the greatest component of the website for the user's experience. The goal is to test the discoverability of the visual cues. During the user testing, the moderator would ask participants to identify the positions of the following visual cues: Almost/already
gone, Low inventory, Disabled, Price breaks, Different rate, Pre-empted, Constraint, Links, Notes.
Reveal pain points and confusing experiences.
The UX team will review the general user flow to identify the pain points of users completing their tasks. Participants were tested to use the visual cue legend to complete the tasks.
PARTICIPANTS OVERVIEW
All participants are marketing specialists in FOX marketing teams with more than one year's experience on AOS sales products.
Due to privacy concerns, the name of participants is abbreviated and the data related to participants' identities are protected. The information above is not 100% corresponding to their actual roles in FOX. However, this doesn't influence the presentation of this user-testing project.
TESTING PROCESS
In the sales workspace. there are totally 7 visual cues for user testing. All of them are created in 2 versions. One version has lighter colors and less obvious visual cues, no background color was applied to this set of visual cues. The other version has deeper solid colors and stronger visual cues with some background colors.
During the test, we provided both versions as AB testing samples. We showed one screen at a time and asked them to finish the following tasks:
1. Look for the number of low inventory/disabled/empty spots inside the workspace.
2. How many sections are there in the 5th line of product units?
3. Set pre-empted/different states/constraints visual cues to be visible, and quickly find out the spots with rate changes.
4. Make overall comments on each version of visual cues.
TESTING RESULT AND FEEDBACK
75%
of the participants prefer Version 1
25%
of the participants prefer Version 2
50%
of the participants prefer to open 2 visual cues at a time
50%
of the participants prefer to open3 visual cues at a time
62.5%
of the participants think Pre-empted is the most important visual cue.
62.5%
of the participants think Notes are the least important visual cue
Version 1
Version 2
5 of the 8 participants thought version 1 was easier to look at and less cluttered.
6 of the 8 participants found the price break visual cue confusing in both versions.
4 of the 8 participants were confused by the meaning of pre-empted, different rate, constraint visual cues.
7 of the 8 participants struggled to find the visual cue hover state in the version 2 mockup.
The UX team recommends Version 1 with modifications to the price break visual cue.
75% of the participants prefer version 1 overall. 62.5% of the participants failed to find the date associated with the price break visual cue in version 1.
1
The UX team recommends solidifying the meaning of pre-empted, different rate, constraint visual cues to match the users' expectations.
50% of the participants were confused by whether at least 1 or all of the spots in a cell are associated with the visual cues:
2
The UX team recommends having a maximum of 3 visual cues at a time to reduce visual noise.
50% of the participants prefer to open 2 visual cues at a time
50% of the participants prefer to open 3 visual cues at a time.
3
The UX team recommends having a maximum of 3 visual cues at a time to reduce visual noise.
50% of the participants prefer to open 2 visual cues at a time
50% of the participants prefer to open 3 visual cues at a time.
Several factors may have affected the results of the usability test. It's important to remember that people bring their own experiences and biases into a test without realizing that they might color their impressions.
1. The sample size may not be representative of all people that may use the product.
2. While moderation began with a set agenda, questions and tasks administered varied from participant to participant.
3. Human error and misinterpretations of qualitative feedback affected the results to slight but varying degrees.
RESEARCH PRESENTATION
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