TImeline: 4 Months | Jan - Apr 2018

Client: CloudSolar, LLC

Roles: User Researcher, Project Manager

Methods: Stakeholder Interviews, User Interviews, Affinity Diagramming, Surveys, Competitive Analysis, Heuristic Evaluation, Usability Testing

Objective

Over the course of a semester, our team was tasked with identifying key user experience insights for our client SunPort by evaluating their product using UX methodologies including interviews, competitive analysis, surveys, heuristic analysis, and usability testing. Our team's goal was to evaluate their product, create a report of our findings, and offer recommendations for the future. 

Problem

SunPort is an application and smart plug device used to track and offset energy use through the purchase of solar renewable energy credits. In conjunction with the SunPort app, users can see their energy consumption and offsets, renew subscriptions, and consume other informational services while using this product. Currently SunPort has a limited user base with a unique challenge of engaging more users when their product conflicts with users mental models of solar products which makes adoption difficult. In order to accommodate users better, SunPort has decided to implement a new cryptocurrency reward token for using the product. Because this would be an entirely new product, we wanted to gain insight into how users would respond to such a product through exploratory research on how to keep users engaged with the product.

Process

After meeting with our stakeholder and being presented with the problem our team began to develop a research plan for what we wanted to know and what the end goal of our research would be. Throughout each UX method our team compiled individual reports of our findings and recommendations from each research method employed. After our initial interviews our team keyed in on a few particular findings that directed our research in subsequent research projects. 

User Interviews

Our user interviews were the foundation to our subsequent research projects. As a team we created an interview protocol based on our stakeholder interview and our initial hypotheses of user expectations and motivation related to environmentally friendly behavior and interests and hesitations toward cryptocurrency. Our findings showcased strong concerns about the volatility and risk in cryptocurrency as well as user sensitivity to oversharing their product use information to social circles. This informed our recommendations and research in emphasizing ways to engage social interaction that didn't seem invasive. This helped us formulate our overarching question for the remainder of our research, what is the most motivating factor to use a product like SunPort across social visibility, environmental good, and individual rewards. 

Competitor Analysis

After our interviews, we began to analyze how competitor products engage users across the aforementioned factors. We selected competitors based on their end product category and found a number of key competitors. We particularly found that competitors included features not found in the SunPort product that would end up becoming very relevant to our survey research, namely visualizing user impact, implementing user to user engagement for collaboration and competition, and including meaningful virtual rewards to influence user behavior. Group themes such as collaboration and competition became recurrent themes throughout our research findings and became more apparent and significant after our surveys.    

Survey Research

Our survey was especially informative to our overall research findings. We designed our research survey based on the responses and findings generated from the previous research and narrowed in on two aspects we wanted to know more about across our motivating variables, group motivation versus individual motivation. We gathered 130 survey responses and analyzed our data to find that SunPort's target audience was notably more group minded being motivated by online communities and group competition much more than others. These findings directly impacted our recommendations to implement features to allow users to create groups and interact with one another in order to achieve an online community. 

Heuristic Analysis

Utilizing Nielsen's usability criteria our team developed a heuristic for the SunPort application, our team then evaluated the product using our heuristic criteria to find potential usability problems with the most significant of them being the systems failure in error prevention and system feedback. These findings lead to our usability testing criteria.

Usability Testing

Usability testing determined that the product on-boarding process was easy to use except when on-boarding failed dramatically if errors were encountered. The system was almost entirely unable to troubleshoot if the system couldn't connect. Additionally, multiple errors were encountered when attempting to edit schedules. While users could easily engage with the interface to create a schedule they were unable to edit them without deleting the schedule and generating a new one. This in turn was part of the general overall finding that the system did not meet user expectations, engaging with the social features and others were expected to have different interactions or displays. This lead us to develop our recommendations that Sunport follow heuristic conventions more closely to have more consistency in meeting user mental models. 

Challenges & Takeaways

On reflection one of the aspects that was most valuable from this project was learning how to conduct research with users for a completely new product. Because the product did not actually exist it was challenging to identify what information to gather from users, what systems to compare it to, or how to clearly define our user base. But the clear takeaway for me was how valuable and important it is to conduct quality research at each stage because it informs the direction of future projects that depend on that research.

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