Evernote Guerilla Usability Testing
I ran a usability test to uncover pain points in Evernote’s reminder feature on Android and provide a design suggestion.
Questions I wanted to answer
If the problem is not clear or well-understood, you cannot begin to evaluate how effective the solutions are. I wanted to answer the following two questions:
1. Can people easily create a note reminder?
2. Do people understand how to use the reminder list?
Tasks
1. Create a note (for a task or deadline)
2. Set a reminder for the note
3. Indicate task is complete (remove reminder)
For example: Go ahead and create a reminder for a grocery list. Then imagine you finished shopping and now want to indicate you’re done. I wanted to frame the scenarios as open-ended as possible to avoid influencing user behavior.
User Feedback
I organized the results from the usability test by ascending frequency of response, as well as categorized them into four distinct components.
Key Findings
Reminders
Users had difficulty removing reminders from the reminders list.
“How do I remove this item off the list?”
The most prevalent usability problem was in removing a reminder after completing the task — people expected the reminder to go away after checking it off. Instead, the item is checked and text greyed out with a strikethrough, but remains unmoved. Most people tried repeatedly unchecking it, and could not figure out how to get rid of the reminder. Many people tried to swipe left to delete.
Eventually some people finally found how to remove the reminder by clicking into the note, clicking the reminder icon, and finding [Clear Reminder].
RECOMMENDATION: Allow people to remove a reminder the way they expect to. Implement a [swipe left / right] interaction on each reminder option that enables people to remove the reminder. Additionally, allow an undo if it was done by mistake. This would leverage an existing recognizable interaction pattern that people are familiar with, and be efficient in reducing a three-click interaction to one swipe.
