Project Brief
Usability issues that can easily be identified and fixed are pervasive on the web.
We all know that usability problems are bad for users, bad for teams, and bad for businesses. So why do they so often go unresolved?
Enter fuguUX…
✨ fuguUX plans to solve companies’ usability problems through automated web usability analysis
- fuguUX scans the website against 600+ ‘atomic’ & ‘molecular’ heuristics as of now and flags violations as usability issues
- The minimum viable product would scan a website for these issues and display them in a report format
Great! Now, who’d want this product?
fuguUX came to us and asked my team to help them find product-market fit…
However, we chose to delve deeper, adopting a critical perspective to uncover the foundational challenges underlying the issue.
Research
🕵🏼♀️Areas of investigation:
To answer these exploratory questions, we did:
MHCI Capstone Team of 5 members: 2 Developers, 2 Designers, 1 UX Researcher (me)
Lead UX Researcher Literature review, analogous domains and competitor research, research planning, guide development, interviews, UX concept development, user testing, survey development & analysis
fuguUX, a recently founded Pittsburgh based start-up Stakeholders involved: 2 co-founders & 2 software engineers
Timeline
So let’s dive into what we found…
1. Who within an organization has a stake in usability?
- A complex web of stakeholders influences the product before a user can interact with it
- More often than not, many of these teams have conflicting priorities
- Break down in communication and teams not being on the same page culminates in usability issues within the website
2. What challenges do teams face in identifying & fixing usability problems?
Through our research, we found that:
Or at least not as much as we thought they did…
We found that there were a lot of other factors that decided which tasks and projects would be given more priority and most of the ‘atomic’ and ‘molecular’ usability issues were usually near the bottom of the priority list.
Of our 32 surveyed respondents,
Said that time constraints were a hurdle to addressing usability issues
Said that stakeholder buy-in was a barrier to addressing usability issues
These challenges also resonated with participants in our user interviews as an obstacle to addressing usability issues.
Summary of Findings:
Our synthesis revealed a shift in how we approach solutions for usability.
Traditionally, an engineering-driven solution might focus on identifying and addressing 'atomic' (or easiest to find) usability issues first, then scaling up to more complex 'page-level' issues that impact entire task flows—this is the approach Fugu is currently taking.
However, companies are often already aware of the fact that usability problems exist. There’s a reason why they haven’t acted on them.
And that leads us to our next question…
3. Is fuguUX building the right solution (at the right intervention point) to help teams create more usable products?
After thinking critically about the underlying problems, we did a round of abstraction laddering - this involves asking Why and How over and over again until you get to the grassroots.
We also created user archetypes based on our findings to help us quickly ideate for the needs of each stakeholder.
Reframed Problem
And so, we reframed our problem based on the pain points we found:
How might we empower UX professionals within teams to effectively demonstrate and communicate the value of usability improvements to drive meaningful action?
Ideation & Testing
Here are the 3 most well-received ideas out of the 10 ideas we tested.
Idea #1
Idea #2
Idea #3
We conducted speed-dating style concept tests with relevant stakeholders, where we put them in a scenario and asked them to react to a number of different concepts with increasing levels of risk. This kind of testing was designed to elicit conversations around ‘value’ and ‘desirability.’
Findings from Concept Testing
