Grocery Gadget Discovers Great Values in UX Consultation
When the developers of a shopping-list app for mobile devices decided to add support for Nokia smartphones based on Symbian platform, supplying an excellent user experience (UX) was high on their own list.
‘One thing we’ve learned with all our platforms: Whoever has the best user experience wins’, says AnatoliyBabayev, chief technology officer of Flixoft Inc., publisher of the Grocery Gadget app.
To help Grocery Gadget achieve that goal, Nokia provided Flixoft with a UX consultation. The consultant evaluated the app and then created a detailed report that highlighted its strengths, noted some issues, and suggested some improvements.
Because Grocery Gadget originally was developed more than two years ago for other smartphone platforms, developers at Flixoft have had plenty of time to polish the app’s rough edges, based on feedback from actual users. They were also familiar with the idea of mobile heuristics, a series of measures that can be used to ensure a consistent and intuitive user interface. These heuristics include consistency, ease of input, system-status visibility, ergonomics, and ease of use. Yet Flixoft had never conducted any usability testing on the app, largely because such testing was perceived to be prohibitively expensive, Babayev says.
Grocery Gadget is designed to simplify grocery shopping. The personal-productivity app, designed to be used both at home and at the grocery store, works in tandem with Flixoft’s online portal to help consumers save time and money. Consumers can use the app to create and reuse shopping lists, share lists with family members, take and share photos of grocery products, scan prices; search for discount coupons, and more. And the web portal offers easy, fast creation and reuse of shopping lists, e-coupons for discounts, the ability to quickly import recipe ingredients into shopping lists, and the ability to synchronise with the mobile app.
The UX consultant for Nokia reviewed a pre-final version of Grocery Gadget that Flixoft is developing for the Nokia N8 mobile computer, a touchscreen device. Overall, the app got good marks in the consultant’s report. The consultant praised the app’s logical backstepping; adaptability to both portrait and landscape orientations; strong feature set; list-sorting; robust, easy-to-use search function; quick user guide; ability to share shopping lists; and direct connection to technical support.
Some UX issues were discovered. One was the size of certain touchscreen elements. ‘Some are too small to be easily operated by fingers’, the consultant noted. Specifically, the report recommends that elements controlled by an index finger should be at least 7 x 7 mm, while elements controlled by a thumb should be at least 8 x 8 mm. Another issue: the lack of an Exit button, which the consultant suggested be added to the right corner of Grocery Gadget’s main view.
The UX report ranked the issues in four categories of increasing severity — cosmetic, minor, major, or catastrophe — as a way to help the developers prioritise their fixes. For example, element size was deemed ‘major’ by the consultant. That’s an assessment the Grocery Gadget development team agrees with. ‘For us, it’s really important’, Babayev says. ‘If the button is not convenient for the human finger, that means we’ll get hundreds and thousands of complaints, telling us the app is not usable. So it’s not just a matter of looking good — it’s really important to the whole user experience.’
Around the same time the consultant was evaluating Grocery Gadget, Flixoft was conducting some usability testing of its own. The publisher got test users to take the app into a grocery store and use it while shopping. ‘We write down whatever takes longer [than necessary], takes additional clicks, the finger size, response time’, Babayev says. ‘That way, we can make improvements.’
The Grocery Gadget team incorporated changes into the app and submitted it late in 2010 to Ovi Store, where it’s now available. The app currently runs on the Nokia N97, Nokia E7, and Nokia N8 devices, and it sells for $2.99.
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