During Phase II of the SoundCircle Application, we focused on evaluating our current designs through a cognitive walkthrough and informal feedback methods. Using these research strategies could then provide us with a fresh perspective on our application, aiding our future design development process. We could utilize these newly gathered insights to refine and adjust our wireframe design, benefiting both our team and our partner software engineers in their software development process.
In Phase II of developing the SoundCircle application, our UX team employed a couple of research strategies to evaluate our current design progress.
Our first method was a cognitive walkthrough, where we invited students from other Usability Engineering UX teams to review and analyze our current wireframe iteration of SoundCircle. Three UX student evaluators (n = 3) were given access to the wireframes and tasked with evaluating the design by adopting the perspective of one of our personas, Samantha, and her personal scenario. Samantha is described as a 24-year-old recent graduate who frequently travels to various music venues to explore her musical interests. It is shown in her scenario that even though she is shy, she aspires to make friends through the SoundCircle app and hopes to connect with local friends to attend concerts together.
Using this information, the UX evaluators meticulously walked through the wireframes using Samantha’s persona and scenario, identifying areas that overlooked important ideas and lacked critical features. This included an absence of friend-making and profile creation functionalities, comprehensive local event details, and robust location data. Additionally, the evaluators emphasized the need to clearly differentiate SoundCircle as both a music-based social media platform and an event interaction application. The purpose of this analysis would be to help highlight shortcomings in the SoundCircle design so the team could address and improve upon them throughout the iterations of Phase II.
Our second research method we employed was gathering informal feedback from our partnered CSCI 430 Software Engineering class students (n = 65). We posed two open-ended questions:
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"As a potential user, what features or functionalities would make you more likely to use this software and connect with new people?"
- Responses highlighted the importance of diverse music genre options, detailed event information, attendance features, and tools for making and suggesting friends based on similar musical tastes.
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"In what situations could you see yourself using this application?"
- Feedback indicated interest in using the app for following local bands, designing personalized profiles, sharing or concealing music preferences based on user settings, and emphasizing social music-sharing capabilities.
The purpose of this feedback would be to assess our planned features and provide direction on prioritizing specific functionalities later on. This would help concise focus areas and help us better align our design with user expectations during Phase II.
Among 3 feedbacks our team received from the cognitive walkthrough, 2 of which were corresponding to persona Samantha, the other one corresponded to persona Steve.
For Steve, user found out that our product's main page is overwhelming to some degree as it was described as "a lot of information is presented at once". The user also pointed out that the user profile need more clear options to allow be editing because the product was missing buttons to indicate editability. The user wondered that why not asking questions related to music tastes, genres, artists,...after the user finished creating an account. In addition, as the user wants to check out other users' profile, they also want to be able to message the currently viewed user.
For Samantha, users successfully created posts but wonder where to look for, this can be interpreted as the users want to see what post they have made and notifications regarding to their posts (whether someone else like/comment on the post).
As of the feedbacks during the first presentations, the class of software engineers made some suggestions to our team's product. We to be selective among received comments to assest what changes would fit best for out product. We consider making changes for the following problems: The user page was lacking options to add/follow friends that share similar palate in music; some users want to be able to see who also attend the events with them; not giving users ability to share links of posts, events, and music.
The SoundCircle developers acknowledge that our product need a lot of changes to the UI in order to boost the satisfaction of user experience.
In regard to feedbacks we receive, changes have been made to the product.
The first change was for the login process. After successfully login with google account, the app will navigate user to a different page to set up the user's profile. Only after going through the prompts that the user will see the main home page. This is to eliminate the "overwhelming first impression" for new users.
In addition, our team have completely changed the set up for the user profile page. Realizing that our first design of user page is considerably amateur, we decided to uptake our user profile page by enabling adding friends, following people, editing profiles (add preferences, taste, genres,...), showing events. In addition, as an attempt to differentiate our product to other social media platform such as Facebook and Instagram, the SoundCircle UX designers decided to add album review feature on the user page. The user will be able to show their opinions, including scores and commments, on albums that they find like/dislike.
We hope these combined changes will further satisfy user's experience as well as making our product stand out to our competitors.
Despite receiving usable feedback via the usage of Cognitive Walkthroughs performed by external UX designers, the UX team deduced several caveats that affected the overall ability to optimally judge the direction of our current sprint. By not conducting the Cognitive Walkthrough using UX design professionals the UX team is basing our findings on that of external amateur designers who, although using good and reliable practices, have not only inexperience within the field but may also be prone to personality biases (being too nice or too harsh) when performing the designated walkthroughs. Along with utilizing these inexperienced designers, only a small sample size of two out of three Cognitive Walkthroughs were applicable to the current design sprint. Finally, the UX team is still relying on the inferred information used from previously created Personas and Scenarios that are not based upon market research.
Informal Feedback methods were also impacted primarily via the target audience being comprised of mainly computer science students and not a more diverse group. Having a more diverse audience to gather feedback from would provide a more realistic and viable interpretation of our target audience. This may have resulted in most feedback being received as feature requests which were already being represented within the UX team’s user stories board.