Research Questions
1. Can an everyday user compare two products quickly and easily, and to their satisfaction?
2. How easy is it to customize your desk using the planner section in IKEA?
3. Can an everyday user find the Store browsing and checkout timings easily and to their satisfaction?
4. Can an everyday user find the cost to recycle a mattress through IKEA easily and to their satisfaction?
Experimental Designs
Participants
Participant Demographic and Participant Profile Analysis
In total 5 participants were selected who had provided their consent to volunteer as usability test participants whose average age was 27. This is the reason two age groups were shortlisted. (18-29) and (29-38).
Testing Environment:
To provide a neutral environment, the testing was done in each participant’s home for the remote testing and for the In-Person testing University library’s study rooms were booked so that the tests could be conducted. To reduce distractions, open public locations were avoided.
Usability Issues Discovered
Issue 1
Users were not able to find the planner section which lets you customise certain furniture as per your design liking.
Issue 2
Users got annoyed as they could not find the Recycle section which has information about recycling.
Issue 3
Users were reporting the wrong timings for Store Browsing and checkout timings.
Issue 4
Users could not find the compare item option on the search page.
Testing Results and Recommendations
Effectiveness
The completion rate can be used to determine the effectiveness of a task. The completion rate is derived by giving a binary value of '1' if the test participant completes a job and '0' if he or she does not. After looking at the tables in the Task Performance Data section we can say that the effectiveness for all the tasks have been 0%. This is due the fact that although the participants completed the job, they were not able to perform the task in the stipulated amount of time which led to task failure.
Efficiency
The suitable method to find a consistent “Time on task” while dealing with highly skewed values is by introducing a “confidence interval” upon calculating the geometric mean for sample sizes below 25.
As we are dealing with the time parameter, with a sample size of 5 users, we represent the average time on task by calculating the geometric mean (Geomean) with a confidence interval with 5% outliers.
Images below represents the time on average (geomean) time on task for five participants across the 4 tasks and the Errors and Assits plotted across all 5 participants.
Satisfaction
The average score for satisfaction for the website was 64.5% which is considered marginal (51.7-71). There was a possibility for the average score to be low, as participants gave up on some of the tasks.
Heuristic Evaluation
Heuristic evaluation was conducted on the issues found on the IKEA site after testing with 5 participants.
Hierarchical Task Analysis
Task 1:
[ Task Redesigned ]
The unique behaviour observed from the usability testing for this task was that users would generally build a desk manually by selecting the parts rather using the planner section of the site which would make the process easier. This is because they would generally miss the section due to it being hidden in the footer section of the site. The redesign which has been done is backed by the card sorting which was conducted to understand the user’s mental model helped to ease the whole process to reach “Build your own desk” feature which is Plan 4.0 as shown in the flow.
Task 2:
The unique behaviour observed from usability test data was that the users took longer than the expert user time to complete the task so most of the users failed this task. The insights from the users were that they were misled into the sustainability section which did not have recycling information as a part of it.
Task 3:
The data from the usability test reflects that the users would ideally go to the right page to find the information in the store page but would miss the information since the text was too small for browse and checkout timings or would mistake the store timings as Browsing and Checkout timings. Which shows that the information being portrayed on the site is not sending the right message to the users and this was the key insight.
Task 4:
[ Task Redesigned ]
The hierarchical task analysis for the Task 4 is shown below, the behaviour of the users observed from the usability testing for this task was that the users were looking for the Compare Option in the search results and the Compare Option was missing. This problem could be tagged to the 4th Heuristic mentioned in the Nielsen Norman group which is Consistency and standards (Nielsen Norman Group).
So, to compare the two products or (“Desks” as per task) they have to go through the elongated route which is to complete the Plan 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 as shown in the HTA to get the compare option which is Plan 5.0. This indirectly increases time on task which effects the user experience.
So, this feature has been implemented in the redesign where the users can directly compare the products from the search results page rather than taking a convoluted path to use the compare feature.
Card sorting Results
Conducted a closed ended Card sort since the existing information architecture of IKEA was being tested but at the same time also testing if the architecture in line with the audience’s mental model
Site Map
The site map which is shown below is the backed by the user’s mental model after understanding their rationale behind each card sorting exercise.
Information Architecture
The New information architecture of IKEA for the task tested.
Video Demonstration
Video Demo of the Redesign.