User Testing & Feedback

Using the app I completed last week, I conducted user interviews with two of my roommates. Primarily I was pursuing information relating to the core friend-centric nature of my app, which differs substantially from my peers’ apps, which focused more on individual books. Additionally I wanted to gather information on a minor innovation of my own, the title bars which double as search fields.

User 1:

My first user immediately wanted to search for a book to see whether any of their friends had it in their collections, and were confused when this wasn’t possible. After a brief explanation, they looked through friend’s collections to see books their friends liked. This was interesting to them, but didn’t fulfill their initial desire to find a specific book. In their words, “book choice is very personal”, and even though they might be interested in someone else’s book choice, it wouldn’t necessarily influence their own.

User 2:

My second user was most interested in using the app to manage their own book collection. Though they appreciated the usefulness of the API in streamlining the onboarding process, they recommended that adding books by scanning barcodes would probably be the easiest solution. When searching for books, they also desired the ability to locate a specific book among friends’ collections. They were satisfied with the ability to browse through friend’s collections. Overall they liked the app, and found the layout comfortable and easily navigable.

Revisions:

Based on the feedback of my peers I decided to add functionality to allow searches for a specific book. When adding the feature I wished to avoid compromising my initial friend-focused experience, since I believe most of the value of the app lies in it’s social applications. To accomplish this I simply added another button under the “My Friends” section, weighted less heavily than the friends scroll menu but still accented with a black button. This button links to a search functionality similar to the one I used to onboard books by title.