THE H.O.P.E. APP USABILITY TEST
Helping Other People Eat, H.O.P.E. is a local nonprofit organization working to provide financial support to food pantries in the area. They collect donations from members of the community who patron participating local restaurants. The concept is for restaurant patrons to donate a small amount to organizations helping to fight hunger as they treat themselves to a meal out.The organization is working to transition from manual paper donations to their mobile application which would alert users of nearby participating restaurants, politely remind them to donate, and allow users to conveniently donate through PayPal. The app had recently been released prior to our usability testing.
METHOD & ANALYZING THE OUTCOMES
We created five tasks to evaluate how easily users could find "optimal paths" to accomplish tasks like find participating restaurants, make a donation, and set alerts within the app. Being a new app, the 11 participants were all inexperienced novice users with regard to this app and many had not heard of the organization or their efforts.
We wrote down all issues that came up in testing on sticky notes and then grouped the issues to organize and find commonalities and general recommendations.
Challenges: Being that the app was new, we wanted to be able to try to test for learnability. It was difficult organizing the findings into recommendations to promote better UX rather than to simply "change this or that feature."
RESULTS
We were able to present four main recommendations to the Executive Director of H.O.P.E., please see the report for details.
