Download Usability Testing Report - Soma Ray

Discussion
There are a few points of discussion that should be raised about our usability testing. First, our five
usability participants had very similar demographic makeup; they were all women, caucasian, and
American-born. It is important to note that this demographic likely falls within GastroMighty’s main
target audience, however, diversity of participants in future tests would ensure that GastroMighty is
meeting the needs of a greater user base. Likewise, due to geographic and time restraints, all of
our participants were either friends of the research team or friends of friends. This may have
introduced some level of personal bias to the feedback that could have been prevented were we
able to test a different pool of users.
There were two areas of the GastroMighty website that we were not able to test in-depth. First, we
did not include the History page in our task list; we felt that its current functionality prevented us
from devising tasks that would have a logical inclusion of history page’s functions. Despite that,
some participants did still happen upon it during the test. They were glad to see that GastroMighty
allows them to view past meal plans, but wanted more control over using this feature. One
participant wanted to be able to move their meal plans like a widget around on the page. She also
felt that the “bunched up” look of the meal plans on the History page was unappealing. As the
History page is an important feature of GastroMighty, and participants responded well to the
concept, we suggest GastroMighty review our previous heuristic evaluation and comparative
analysis of the site in order to find ways to make this page as user-friendly as possible.
The second area of GastroMighty that had limited testing was the mobile site. We felt it was
important to test the website itself in order to confirm previous research and ensure that we were
providing robust feedback about GastroMighty’s main product. Although we included the mobile
site in one of our tasks, we did not test as in-depth as we may have if we were only focusing on
this interface of the product. We also ran into some trouble during the testing of the mobile site, as
the internet connectivity in our testing space was limited. Two of our participants had to use a
moderator’s phone in order to complete the mobile task. Because the moderator was unable to
sign out of their own account on the mobile site, they were forced to complete the task with the
moderator’s account rather than the user testing account. Despite this issue, we feel that the
interactions with the mobile site provided enough valuable feedback to include in this report. We
strongly recommend that GastroMighty explore the usability of the mobile site further by
conducting user research in the future that focuses only on mobile.
Usability Testing Report 14