CONTEXT

A design challenge to redesign a current mobile application (of our choice) using the 10 usability heuristics for design.

My partner and I identified a specific task within the app and selected five heuristics to evaluate the usability.  Based on our findings, we worked together to create solutions via sketching, wireframing and finally, designing high-fidelity screens - ensuring our design solutions matched the existing brand and UI components as closely as possible. 

Timeline:

• 5 Days

Team:

• Caitlyn

• Nick

My Role:

• Heuristic evaluation

• Inspiration

• Sketching

• Lo-fi wireframing

• Presentation planning

PROCESS

Choosing a Task

Selecting a movie and purchase tickets.

A crucial moment in any ecommerce platform is the payment page.  We wanted the process of purchasing a ticket to be seamless which would result in increased sales for the company.

Scoring System

We created a clear heuristic guide to use as a reference when identifying the current usability issues of the app.

Identifying the Issues

After analyzing the design and usability, we applied five out of the ten usability heuristics (from the Nielsen Norman Group) that we thought were appropriate to the app and scored them.

Overview of Our Findings

We found the cineplex app (iOS) usable and does complete the task at hand. However, some key usability issues we discovered within the design were inconsistency, poor information hierarchy, and an unintuitive payment process.  This left us the opportunity to enhance the task flow experience of purchasing movie tickets on the app.

REDESIGN PROCESS

Brainstorm

After looking at existing design patterns as inspiration for our redesign, we got out our sharpies and paper, and brainstormed the redesign.

WIREFRAME REDESIGN

Aesthetic & Minimalist Redesign

Flexibility & Efficiency of Use

User Control & Freedom

Visibility of System Status

CONCLUSION

Reflection

Identifying the heuristic usabilities was a challenging process for Nick and I. We found each principle was very vague and that it intertwined with other principles. With the help of the Norman Nielsen website, online resources (prototypr.io), and the chrome plugin UX check, we gained a better understanding of each heuristic that we applied for this design challenge.

With our redesign of the Cineplex App, we felt that we did a substantial job in identifying the heuristic problems. We feel the redesign will help improve the usability as well as the user experience, resulting in an increase of ticket sales and a decrease of cart abandonment.

Next Steps

If given more time, we would have liked to conduct user testings to evaluate our redesign. We would be able to synthesize the findings into a session output and iterate the design. By doing this, it will allow us to elevate the design, usability, and enhance the user experience.