Purpose

The purpose of this project was to evaluate the Asthma MD mobile application for its usability and efficiency. If we encountered any usability issues, my group was tasked with finding design solutions for those issues.

Processes Used

My group performed a variety of inspection methods in order to locate any usability issues with the AsthmaMD mobile application. After we completed our inspection methods, we created a lo-fi prototype and performed rounds of usability testing to see how users used the mobile application. Below are the steps we took to complete this project.

Step 1 - We performed a heuristic evaluation using Jacob Nielsen's usability heuristics. The heuristics that we used are shown below.

Step 2 - After performing our heuristic evaluation, we performed a cognitive walkthrough to further evaluate the usability of the product. The tasks of our cognitive walkthroughs is listed below:

Step 3 - After we completed our inspection reviews, we performed 1 round of usability testing to test how users were able to use the AsthmaMD mobile application. In our first round of usability testing, the participant was entailed to complete 5 tasks. Here is a link to the test plan that we created: Test Plan

Step 4 - After we've completed our first round of usability testing, we created a lo-fi prototype to make design changes on the AsthmaMD mobile app. These design changes were based on user feedback and user observation. Here is a link to the lo-fi prototype that my group and I created: Asthma MD Lo-Fi Prototype

Step 5 - We tested our lo-fi prototype with the actual AsthmaMD mobile application using UserTesting.com. After that, we performed a stastical analysis to quantify the results of our A/B usability test.

Results

Results from Our Heuristic Evaluation - Each group member performed heuristic evaluations of their own. Through our heuristic evaluations, we discovered that the app contained these 3 common heuristic violations that are listed below.

Results From Our Cognitive Walkthrough - Each of us performed seperate cognitive walkthoughs to evaluate the usability of the AsthmaMD mobile application. Through our cognitive walkthroughs, we found out that users would have a hard time completing these tasks because the language was hard for them to understand.

Results from Rounds of Usability Testing - For our first round of usability testing, we discovered that users would have trouble completing our assigned tasks due to the language being hard to understand, inconsistency with its functionality, and icons/visual artifacts not standing out.

In order to rectify these issues, we created a lo-fi prototype to address the issues that users ran into. When we performed an A/B usability test with UserTesting.com, we found out that users were able to use our lo-fi prototype much better than the AsthmaMD mobile application.