Discord Usability

Role: Usability Researcher

Method: Heuristic Evaluation, Competitive Analysis, First-Click Test, System Usability Scale (SUS)

Duration: March 2022 - May 2022

Team: Abby Brams and Paul Tang

Introduction

In my usability testing class, we learned the importance of testing interfaces to learn what works and doesn't work for a potential user. These tests can be performed with just a prototype or even on a system that has been released for awhile and isn't performing as well as intended. To test our knowledge on these methods, we were tasked with creating a large scale usability test of a company website or application of our choosing.

The Project

For this assignment, we were tasked with doing a large scale usability test for a company website or app of our choosing. My team chose the Discord web application. Discord is an instant messaging platform where users can communicate through text chats, video and voice calls, and media or files in direct messaging or in communities also known as servers.

We began this project by creating a Usability Test Plan. Here, we documented what we wanted to learn from our test of Discord and how we were going to execute the tests. Our preliminary research included a heuristic evaluation and competitive analysis which can be found in our final document. We discussed different test methods and decided which ones we would use that would provide us with the most useful information. The test plan also consisted of our timeline for this project and the different test methods we were going to use.

After our test plan got approval from our professor, we began testing virtually through the online platform, UserTesting.com. We each set up three tests, for a total of nine different participants. UserTesting handled finding participants for us based off of our targeted demographics, and then notified us once all of the tests were completed. We asked all participants to use the Think-Aloud Process (TAP), to fully understand the thoughts that go into each of the users decisions and clicks. At the end of the test, there were ten scaled questions which were apart of the System Usability Scale (SUS). Each participant answered based on a scale from 1-5 and we averaged each of the answers. The questions and results can be found in the appendix of our findings report.

We each analyzed the tests individually to look for any problem areas in Discord's interface. We then met up virtually through Discord to discuss our findings and create the final test deliverable, which can be found at the top of the page.

Key Takeaways

• I really enjoyed learning the process of conducting usability tests
• This project helped me realize that I want my career to be in usability testing
• The first-click test was difficult to conduct virtually, I would like to find an easier way to get more accurate results next time I use this method