Oros: Real-time Feedback From Real Users
Real Time Q&A App
My Role:
User and competitive research
Redesign the topic/occupation selection page
Design the profile page
Collaborate with the team on creating information architecture
Usability Testing
Present design to stakeholders with the entire team
Team:
3 Designers
Duration:
3 weeks
Project Overview:
Oros is a crowdsourcing group messaging app that allows users to ask questions and get real time answers from other users. Oros officially launched in April 2018 and currently has 5000+ users, 70% of them are Android users while the remaining 30% are iOS users.
Oros would like to achieve the following goals at the end of this 3 week project:
Improve the UX/UI on the existing MVP (Make it easy to navigate with a fresh and modern outlook)
Shorten the registration process from 2 minutes to less than 1 minute
Increase user engagement and app trust
My Design Process
Current MVP Usability Testing
Since Oros already has an app that's available to download, the team decided to test the current product with users.
I interviewed 2 people (the team interviewed a total of 6 people) between age 26 and 30, and asked them to complete the following tasks: account registration, "Ask a question", and their overall experience with OROS.
We found that users encountered following problems:
The categories in hobbies and occupations selection pages are unorganized. Plus, the horizontal scrolling took users a significant amount of time to choose the items that they're looking for.
Users said they have low trust on people who answered the questions because they couldn't see the answerer's profile detail.
The "My" and "All" tabs on the home screen were very confusing. Users have trouble knowing what those tabs really mean.
Icons such as "submit", "search", and "profile" were hard to find.
Competitive & Domain Analysis
Competitive Analysis
The biggest strengths Reddit and Quora have is that both platforms have robust communities. Users are able to not only upvote/down vote answers, but also view each other's profile to build up trust.
Although OROS currently lacks several trust-building features, the "target filter" is something that differentiate OROS from its competitors.
Oros SWOT Analysis
OROS is still a very new product that has several weaknesses include low community and user trust.
What differentiate OROS is it's "Real-time" Q&A feature as well as the audience filter function.
The team believed that by improving the current UX/UI and creating a user profile page would significantly help OROS stand out.
Persona 1 & Customer Journey
Persona 2 & Customer Journey
Solution
Since the business would like to maintain the app's current position without adding too many additional features, the team used the MoSCoW method to narrow down the functionalities with the time constraint.
Here are some of the critical features we discussed:
MUST HAVE- 1) Add a third tab to view questions from the interested communities
2) "Thumb up" answers to increase user engagement
3) Create a robust user profile to build up trust
4) Redesign the hobbies/occupation selection pages to make them more easy to select for usersSHOULD HAVE- 1) Enable users to follow other questions
2) See other users' profiles
3) Add clarity around "Choose your audience" filtersCOULD HAVE- 1) Tag question with topic category
2) Tutorial for new users
3) Give Question Asker the ability to thank people for their answersWON'T HAVE- 1) Share Q&A with non-members
Ideation
The team first drew out 2 user flows: one for ask-er (people who ask questions), and one for answer-er (people who are selected to answer questions).
The user flow gave us a better picture on which screens current users struggle.
We decided to sketch out the pages that need improvements: choose topics page, choose occupation page, homepage, ask-a-question page. I also sketched out a user profile page because Oros currently doesn't have it, which gave users distrust of the app.
The team spent 2 days deciding on the styles of the topic and occupation selection pages because currently the app had 80+ topics that you can choose from, which is very time consuming according to user research.
We did a quick card sort on both the topic and occupation pages on Trello to organize similar items into categories.
After grouping, we narrowed down to 15 categories for topics, and 21 job industries.
The team then translated the sketches into wireframes.
I compared the styles of category navigation of Quora, Reddit, and did some research on how to increase selection efficiency on the Nielsen Norman Group websites. The team tried on different styles and decided to do some usability testings to know what users think.
The following are some examples of the wireframes/ideas of the topic selection page:
Current OROS topic selection navigation
Current OROS topic selection navigation:
1. Horizontal scroll
2. No categories. Topics are all spread out
3. Topics are organized alphabetically from top to bottom
4. Buttons are small
Usability test findings:
1. Time consuming
2. Unorganized. Hard to pick topics because topics are jumping around.
Redesigned OROS topic selection navigation
Redesigned Version:
1. Vertical scroll
2. Only list out categories (based on the card sort result).
3. Categories are ordered alphabetically
4. Increase button size to 44 px height that match the iOS guidelines
5. Dropdown style of subcategories. Two subcategories per line to save more scrolling space
Usability test findings:
1. Easy to scroll and see with large buttons.
2. Faster selection process
3. Organized
User Interface
The team made the UI (color) redesign consistent with the current OROS app. Since the client would like to change the button color (Calls-To-Action buttons) from blue to something that's more popped, fresh, and easy-to-see for users, we came up with 3 style tiles for our client to choose from.
The challenge was to make the CTA clear while passing the 3.0 Android color contrast guideline.
Eventually, we agreed on the color #FF530D for the CTA buttons like "Next" and "Ask a Question" after discussing with the stakeholders from the Marketing side.
Mockups
Prototype
Next Steps
According to the stakeholders, the short-term next steps for OROS are:
1. Start implementing the topic/occupation selection redesigned pages
2. Implementing the user profile page
3. Add a "referral" button on the home page to get more users into the app
What I learned
1. Usability testing is a MUST
We learned that the current OROS app rolled out with very minimum usability testing. As a result, users are experiencing problems like time consuming registration process, community-less environment, and low trust. I learned that talking to users is really the key to create a successful user experience.
The way to avoid the curse of knowledge is to stop assuming.
2. Communicate with stakeholders often
After the initial stakeholder interview, we set weekly meeting with the client while constantly emailing the project updates. Although the project was only a 3 week span, I felt I really got to know about OROS, the founder, and where the company is heading. Keeping out client updated of the project also avoided miscommunication or confusion.
3. Android GUI V.S. iOS GUI
OROS is currently available to download on both Android and iOS devices. It was also my first experience designing for 2 different operating systems. Based on what OROS has right now, the team got a fairly good understanding of what is allowed on both system.
However since iOS has a stricter rule on the guideline (e.g. 4.50 on the color contrast, at least 44px button height, etc), we had to not only go through several documents to make sure our design match iOS guideline, but talked to our stakeholders about the limitations.
It was a great experience to learn the depth of UX from a single project!
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