My Role (Team of 4): UX Researcher (Student Intern)

Duration: (3 months) Jan 2015 - Mar 2015

My Responsibilities: Study Plan, Heuristic Evaluation, User Scenarios and Test Script, Task Matrix, Post Task Questionnaire, Moderator, Data collection, Research Analysis, Research Findings Presentation

Overview

With our sponsor - Microsoft's support, my team and I conducted exploratory usability studies on their cloud based service - OneDrive. Our primary aim was to find out why users choose Google Drive and DropBox over OneDrive and to provide design recommendations to the OneDrive Design team to increase their market share.

STUDY PLAN

The team and I decided to conduct the study in four phases as shown below:

We were asked to conduct an exploratory study to understand how students collaborate with each other, the digital collaboration tools they use and in what capacity. This being the premise, we designed a survey screener to select students who frequently collaborated online on school projects. We distributed the survey through several channels such as Facebook student groups and the Microsoft User-Research Database and received close to 4000 responses.

Based on the above information I created our user-profiles which consisted of Google Drive Power users because it had the maximum feature parity with the OneDrive.

I further refined our participant list by conducting in-depth interviews to understand more about the daily scenarios as part of their collaborative work and the issues they encounter while doing so. Based on their feedback and the heuristics we conducted, we came up with detailed scenarios.

Testing

We conducted the study with 8 participants at the Microsoft Studios. We used Ovo Logger and our manual entries to record the data.

Findings & recommendations

We used the data to find patterns of reoccurring problems that users had while using OneDrive. I created a success task matrix to find the tasks where those problems occurred and then used the quantitative and qualitative data to find the specific problems.

I created screens and overlays on top of the OneDrive UI to provide design recommendations. I created a presentation for the design team where I used the supporting observations (both quantitative and qualitative) along with the excerpts of the testing video logs to provide a base for the design recommendations.

I also created a report with the same information for the design team to keep a log off.