Heuristic Evaluation: App

Sami Cohanim | Assignment 2 | 9/15/21

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Visibility of System Status

Issue: There is no indication of where you are in the onboarding process and how many more steps there will be which could cause users to get frustrated and drop off.

Severity: 3

Recommendation: Add a progress indicator so that the user knows where they are, how many more pages there are, and are more seamlessly guided through the process.

2

Match between the system and the real world

Issue: The captions for these categories can be wordy and confusing, and the photos don’t quite match the descriptions. For example, pringles was not included in the week long savings category. This can cause users to get overwhelmed and spend too much time choosing where to go next in the app.

Severity: 2

Recommendation: Add more cohesion among the images and descriptions. Simple icons could help with the cognitive load.

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3

User control and freedom

Issue: The Cart Calculator feature does not contain a back or skip button or any way to escape the pop-up walkthrough which limits the user’s freedom.

Severity: 3

Recommendation: Allow for the option to skip the steps or escape the pop-up.

4

Consistency and standards

Issue: The “your store services” section of the homepage has a horizontal carousel sliding feature, however the rest of the page does not which makes the UI unpredictable and inconsistent.

Severity: 2

Recommendation: Either have this section static, especially since it is only two categories, or provide the rest of the homepage with similar carousel features so that it is all more cohesive.

5

Error prevention

Issue: The confirmation dialog for requesting to add your location occurs more than twice, even when you opt to “skip for now”. This proves to be a substantial interruption.

Severity: 2

Recommendation: Allow the user to add their location at another time.

6

Recognition vs. recall

Issue: When you click “add to order”, the button does not change but stays the same color and shape so that you cannot tell in the UI if that particular item has already been added to your cart.

Severity: 3

Recommendation: Provide a check mark and/or “added” text on the button instead once the item has been added to the cart.

Aesthetic and minimal design

Issue: The homepage does not contain much content that is useful for a user using this app. The ads take you directly to the DG website, and away from the app which is distracting and takes away from the app’s useful functionalities. The ads are also very busy and noisy.

Severity: 2

Recommendation: Move the ads to a less prominent part of the app. Indicate that this action will take you outside of the app and onto their website.

8

Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors

Issue: My first attempt at signing up, there was a bug that caused me to lose all my progress, with an error message prompting me to start over.

Severity: 3

Recommendation: Save progress along the way so that if an issue arises, the user does not have to re-input all of the information again.

9

Help and documentation

Issue: There is no search for help, instead there is a help link on most feature pages with a popup walkthrough. This can get frustrating for people to be swiping through on different pages to understand how a certain features should be used and how to address issues.

Severity: 1

Recommendation: Consolidate help with searching in one concise place where search results are easy to scan.

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Heuristic Analysis

• The app’s homepage could use improvements in order to show more of the features that the app encompasses rather than the ads that take you away and onto the website.
• The app is overall very busy with images and text as well as very high and very low contrast areas which makes it overwhelming to use.
• The app has several prompts and requests of the user that are very forceful and don’t allow the user the freedom to choose which aspects and information they would like to disclose.

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