Problems found in our usability group testing

We repeatedly organized usability testing groups at an elderly care home. The groups were composed of 6 people with ages around 70-year-old. We realized interviews, took notes and recorded the sessions.

• We found that users have trouble finding where to click to advance in the test.
• Users have trouble finding where to type answers.
• Users say instructions are wordy, confusing, and with too much text. They could listen a narration from the app reading the instructions, but it was still very overwhelming.
  
• They have trouble understanding that some exercises ask for several repetitions.
  

Insights

• Elderly people are usually not very eager to use technology and get frustrated with it very quickly, so making the layout as obvious, user-friendly and consistent is super important.
• People don’t mind to read as long the text is useful and easy to understand.
  
• Information in the text has different levels of importance. People need to scan quickly what is the most important information to know at the moment.
  
• Users often confuse the GIF example as the real exercise because both screens look very similar.
  

Redesign overview

Continue/navigation

On the previous design, buttons were following the content. If content grew, buttons were pushed down. Often, the buttons would be hidden partially or completely to the visible screen. Making the buttons stay on a fixed place, help the user know where is everything all the time. The downside of this solution is that content won't be able to grow freely as before.

Titles and paragraphs

I added short titles with bold font to highlight the main idea in the instructions. If users need further information they will continue reading the paragraph. In this specific case I even added a spacial place to the time to be drawn and a component to keep track of the attempts.

Top bar was changed to color white to improve visual hierarchy and readability

My theory was that there was too much visual noise by using green in a lot of elements, the top bar and buttons were using green. Now, only the buttons, the number of attempts, and the progress bar are green, making it easier to be seen what you should interact with.

Final design

I also made several design changes on margins, color use, and typography. Here you can appreciate some redesigned screens.