Usability testing is so humbling – even when you’ve already experienced it.
Tonight we asked Mel’s cousin Jenny to add recipes to meltingfood for pork belly and mango jelly cake (I’m eating it right now). Thanks for having us to stay with you in Singapore.
I’d cheated the first step yesterday by creating an account for her (then sending her a ‘forgot password’ email). Forgot password emails are very common and the link was obvious. +1
Then it gets brutal:
- On entering a new password you get an error message saying your reset token has expired.
- Trying to get to the ‘home’ page caused confusion about the difference between your own and everyone’s recipe lists. In fact, the first attempt was to logout to see everyone’s list of recipes.
- Unable to work out how to give a star rating the recipe. Google’s +1 was the first suspect. Followed by clicking through 1 star, then 2 star, 3, 4 and 5 in order to set it to 5 stars.
- Adding a recipe, but then wanting to cancel – resulted in save being clicked (’cause there was no other option).
- I’d added something I thought was clever where you get random recipe titles if you don’t enter one… cute, maybe. Completely confusing, unpredictable for people, yep.
- Delete recipe – icon is hard to find. Was found by hovering over each button and reading the text.
Fixes:
- Remove or extend reset token duration and provide error messages with instructions / link to fix.
- Not sure yet.
- Change 0-star unrated recipes to have text instead of ‘empty’ star icons – and ‘add rating’ or similar link.
- Add recipe needs a cancel link – not enough to have click to elsewhere to escape.
- “No title” or something as a default title (if one is required). And not save recipes that are completely empty.
- Consider icon & text or text only delete and edit buttons.
This only took 5-10 minutes, nothing high tech and has clearly exposed half a dozen usability issues.
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