Overview
This is my passion project. I love cars and modifying cars, but with those changes come with consequences and challenge. This challenge is the road. The road can be rough and cruel, especially depending on the style and condition of your car; modified or not. I have a modified car, lowered with aggressive wheels and stance, that makes driving on the streets a struggle in of itself. Dodging potholes, dips, steep entrances are all part of the challenge. There are apps out there that help you get from A to B while avoiding as much traffic as possible, but how about an app that can get you from A to B with the best road conditions and obstacle-free as possible? Thus, STREETFIGHTR is born.
Role
Notetaker
Support
Support
Team
Project Overview
I already knew how much of a struggle it is for an owner of a modified car in the streets. I am one of those people. I am a target audience. STREETFIGHTR is an app dedicated to providing routes and strategies for drivers to travel while avoiding as much road problems and obstacles.
What's wrong?
Potholes, road irregularities, dips, steep entrances/exits are all a car enthusiast (mainly lowered cars) archnemesis. Constant scraping and body damage is part of the life, but how can we minimize the amount of difficulty in driving? How can drivers avoid these problems on the road when traveling?
Solutions?
A map based application that calculates the best routes with the best road conditions(minimizing road hazards and obstacles) for drivers. Through the help of crowdsourcing data and interaction (similar to Waze), drivers can navigate happily and less damaging for their cars.
Goals & Outcomes
To build an application that provides the best route based on crowdsourced data. To do this, we must go through the entire design process from conception to development.
- Conduct qualitative surveys and determine users main needs and validate the purpose of the app
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Users & Audience
The target users are those who are interested in quality, hi-res, and surround sound audio. The target users may have home theater solutions such as soundbars, stereo, surround, etc. The target users must also may or may not have smart home solutions, such as Alexa, Ring, Hue, etc.
Scope
Stakeholders would like to understand how users setup their soundbars and connect it to Alexa. We outsourced recruitment and facility to a local agency that specializes in marketing recruitment for test sessions. We were to assess the difficulties found in the setup and use of the soundbar. Additionally, we are limited in design by the engineers of the soundbar, designers of the instructions/box, and Amazon, due to allowing us certain compatibilities and functions that Alexa and our products operations.
Process
Define project scope and plan
Because this has been a design in progress for 2 iterations, the project scope did not change. The plan is to conduct multiple iterations of user testing to continue improving the app design and usability.
Because this has been a design in progress for 2 iterations, the project scope did not change. The plan is to conduct multiple iterations of user testing to continue improving the app design and usability.
Define users
Because this is a "niche" audience (home theater owners with IOT), stakeholders and UX team defined that these types are the ones most likely to purchase our home audio solutions with voice assistant compatibility.
Because this is a "niche" audience (home theater owners with IOT), stakeholders and UX team defined that these types are the ones most likely to purchase our home audio solutions with voice assistant compatibility.
Because of how specific the criteria was, we had to outsource to the external agency as we depleted our resources for internal employee and external family/friends database.
Research
We conducted 9 OoBE tests, 7 whom were male, and 2 females. All candidates must own a soundbar and have set up their soundbar themselves. They all had high interest in home theater sound and solutions, as well as own a voice assistant such as Alexa and Google Home.
OoBE Test
We begin by asking about their products they own; to gauge why they like and dislike it, how much they paid and why, and how they researched it and bought it. Additionally, we also gauged their use of their smart devices and voice assistants, such as common commands and their use cases.
They are given a scenario where they purchased the test product, but already currently own a soundbar. They also need to set it up with the voice assistant in the room. With the boxed item never opened, they are to open and setup the product as if they just bought it themselves in their own home.
I would time to time ask about their experiences and thoughts about certain aspects at certain "checkpoints" while the participants freely voice and interact with the product and app. Most of the test is primarily observing the participants actions and comments, to understand their mental and physical processes for setting up a soundbar, and see how they understand connecting a soundbar to a voice assistant means and works.
Conclusion We were surprised to find out that setting up the soundbar itself was already a challenge, and when not setup correctly, the rest of the steps were not followed, and correct setup was not achieved. Because of one failure, it threw off the whole flow and left some participants confused and stuck, had I not helped them. Because we did an expert review and went through the complete setup before the test, we already predicted where there may be pain points. Our predictions came through, although we did not anticipate for difficulty of physically setting up the soundbar. Takeaways When one thing doesn't work, the rest doesn't work either. We as humans tend to go step by step, whether or not we read instructions. So if one step throws us off, it will affect the rest. In this case, almost no one could figure out how to set up Alexa because they truly just didn't know how and nothing on the package or instructions told them how. Being straightforward goes a long way. If the package or instructions clearly stated how or where to go to setup Alexa, then users would not have such a hard time. What I learned As a moderator, the biggest thing I learned was preparation was key. I was too caught up in trying to remember how to talk to participants, that I did not anticipate how to troubleshoot technical difficulties and how to steer the test. Right off the bat, I wasted a lot of time letting the participant interact with the product freely, and did not know what to do when the test flow started to go awry. However, after seeing the worst, I was able to practice throughout the other sessions and began to anticipate and plan accordingly on my notes, listening to the participant, and observing their actions all at the same time.
Findings
All participants could not find anything about Alexa on the packaging, product, or instructions. How is a user supposed to know that their product is Alexa compatible if it isn't advertised?
Most participants did not fully read the setup guide, thus having difficulty understanding how to set up the soundbar and get to the on screen display.
Because they did not get to the on screen display, the participants did not realize that the soundbar had to be connected to the internet to work with Alexa. Most participants thought that you can connect devices (in this case a soundbar) to Alexa via bluetooth. Because instructions were unclear, participants were connecting the test phone to the soundbar with bluetooth, and tried to troubleshoot connection by using the soundbar app and Alexa app on the phone. Some participants had trouble using voice commands to control the soundbar. Alexa uses very discrete commands for it to work, but users thought Alexa was smart enough to understand their commands.