Below are the key issues that we uncovered from the Heuristic Evaluation exercise. In order to make this writing more digestible, I've clustered them into 6 big themes.
Below are the key issues that we uncovered from the Heuristic Evaluation exercise. In order to make this writing more digestible, I've clustered them into 6 big themes.
What can I do here?
When our user lands on viki.com, it feels like entering a mall with many salesmen shafting brochures into your hands. There are no clear features that services user intent—especially true for the majority of Viki users who are returning users. The new Landing experience needs to serve new users, power users and QCs.
I can’t easily find it
Holistically, the viki.com website has an unruly hierarchy that doesn’t support effective navigation. It is hard to find some content as they are buried under multiple layers. It is also hard to understand some of our navigation labels and links.
I want to learn more about this show before watching it
The Show Page (container page) is way too long. Most Viki users rely on the information on the Show page to decide if they should invest time and energy to start watching. In short, this page needs a more usable layout and cleaner IA.
So, what’s next for me?
Currently, when a user finishes watching a show, their viewing experience ends abruptly. The service should anticipate what the user wants to do next. This might be watching the next episode, find a new drama to watch, or check out what other fans said about the episode they have just watched.
Update me but don’t piss me off
According to our recent research survey, notifications is our 2nd most important feature (behind ratings and reviews). However, our web experience doesn’t notify our users appropriately—especially when there are events relevant to their interests. At the same time, we do not want to push annoying notifications to them. Hence, we need to make sure that our notifications are meaningful for the users and not purely driven by the business ROI.
Viki should know me better like an old friend!
Lastly, our recommendation (be it through AI or manual curation) needs be improved. Otherwise, it just feels like noise for them. From the findings, we also need to be better at explaining our recommendations to the users, so that they understand the reasons behind the recommended shows.
Note: For this case study...
Due to the scale of the project, I will only share the output and learnings for: Theme 1, Theme 2, Theme 3 and Theme 4.
Before crafting the hi-fi design, we wanted to see if there’s any way we could shorten the existing user flow for discovering and watching a show. We also discovered that users take at least 3 clicks to start playing a video.
This was not a good experience considering the amount of steps the users need to take in order to watch a show. Our biggest metric is Watch Time, so we thought that by shortening the journey should be a good start for this project.
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After we received some feedback from the users, we iterated and turned those sketches into hi-fi wireframes. The main usage of these wireframes was for cross-functional discussions with other important stakeholders: Engineering, Marketing and Content Operation teams.
The proposed new designs below will try to answer some of these big questions that we gathered from the Heuristic Evaluation findings:
1. How might we spotlight specific content in more attractive ways?
2. How might we design for content ‘window shopping’, allowing users to better understand what the shows are about?
Heavily focused on Community by encouraging users to write a review about the show, to give 'Kudos' to the volunteers who subtitled the shows in other languages and as well as 'Follow' the show to receive future updates.
Here are some of the micro-interactions that I composed for internal communications. These were mostly used for feasibility studies and to set design output expectations to the developers.
In my opinion, heuristic evaluation is an effective method to uncover problems right at the early stage of the project. Everyone, not just designer, can use this method to gather problems quickly, and cheaply.
Like any other design process, heuristic evaluation exercise should not be done by one person or the Design Team. Get your Product Managers to do exercise with you. My mistake was that, I did it without the involvement of my Product Manager, and we ended up having to explain to him the details behind each findings. He was glad with the outcome, however, it took him awhile to get the idea.
Many people said that the proposed design is looking a lot like Netflix's or Hulu's. Some will say that it's another lazy execution work. Well, I have a few points to counter such feedback: