RealDealz aims to make it easier to find the best deals on video games and software products by creating an all-in-one platform. This allows users to spend less time moving between multiple websites and allows for them to find their desired product quickly so they can spend less time searching and more time playing.
Our team had other UX designers from the class conduct cognative walkthroughs using our personas and scenarios to gain a better understanding of how users will interact with our product. Also, the software team performed a demo and recieved feedback from other software engineers in their class.
Cognitive Walkthroughs: To further refine our product and identify areas for improvement, we also employed cognitive walkthroughs. This involved having three peers from different UX teams perform cognitive walkthroughs of our wireframes using our personas and scenarios. The purpose of this method was to gather feedback from an outside perspective from other UX designers to gain a better understanding of our product’s strengths and weaknesses. This method involved a systematic evaluation of our product’s usability by walking through user scenarios step-by-step, identifying potential issues and areas for improvement. By utilizing this method, we were able to identify critical areas for improvement and gain a more complete understanding of how users might interact with our product.
Software Team Feedback: The software team also performed a demo of what they had so far to members of other software teams. The purpose of this method was to gather feedbck from an outside perspective about the strengths and weakness. After performing the demo, they shared the feedback they recieved with us so that we can use some of the feedback when it comes to the UX design.
Wireframes: The designing and implementation of the wireframes allowed for our team to get a better understanding of the layout and expected functionality of our website. This allowed for our team to experiment with different layouts and expectations of a user’s experience, which resulted in a very minimalist design that focused on the essentials. Once we were satisfied with the wireframe we tested it using cognitive walkthroughs performed by three fellow UX designers.
Cognitive Walkthroughs: Three fellow UX designers from our class performed cognitive walkthroughs using our personas and scenarios to give us a better understanding of how users how haven’t seen our website will interact with it. Through These interactions it was brought forth that the search bar on our wireframes along with filters on our tables were not working as intended, which turned out to be a significant discovery for our team. These issues are important for a user’s experience as it takes away from the original goal of finding the best deal on video games and software in a quick and easy manner.
Software Team Feedback: Based on the feedback the software team received from their demo, we were able to get an outside perspective from potential users and were able to identify changes and features that they would like to see. Users would like to see the current best deals on the homepage, and users would also like options for filtering games.
Based on the findings from the wireframes, cognitive walkthrough process, and feedback from the software team, we were able to identify several issues that greatly impact the user experience. We specifically need to ensure that we have a working search bar and filtering on the tables for each page that needs them, and list of the current best deals on the homepage with the price and sale percentage. We also discovered the need to highlight information and buttons by using effective call-to-action so as to allow for users to have a more efficient experience. Moving forward, we will apply these new insights towards the building of our prototype so as to allow users to have a more meaningful and user-friendly experience.