What did we want to learn?
Before launching the extension on the Chromestore, our team needed to observe how our beta audience experienced the early prototype. In particular, we wanted to observe how our users perceived its ease of use, the time it it took to accomplish certain tasks, and assess how successful our users were in accomplishing those tasks.
We decided to test for the following user tasks:
- Get onboarded
- Access the Acciyo Timeline
- Navigate along the Timeline
These tasks were broad enough, which allowed us to follow up with specific questions as our testers experienced the prototype.
After 5 rounds of user-testing, we observed the following issues:
01/04. Lack of education
Upon getting onboarded, our users were greeted with a generic landing page that directed them to the app but was not deemed useful in teaching the user on how to experience the product; we learned that users preferred an onboarding tutorial.
"Even here on this screen...Diving me straight to these 3 things that you're recommending is less useful than me having an overview of how to use this tool"
"I'm assuming it's going to take me to a relevant tutorial about how it adds value (onboarding articles)"
02/04. Significant barriers to onboarding
Our testers were not keen on sharing their email with an unknown product upon signing up. We learned that they would have preferred to experience the product firsthand as anonymous guests.
These observations were confirmed after conducting a Funnel Analysis on Amplitude that tracked how many users moved along along the onboarding process from initial sign-up up to eventually interacting with the Timeline. We were surprised to see that no users continued with the sign up process and over 46% ended their session immediately.
"I'd expect to try the product for free first."
"If your product has something that I want and you're forcing me to sign up, I would use a temporary email as a test account.
03/04. Interaction painpoints
The Timeline posed a conflict to our users' mental model on scrolling vertically. Typically, a vertical scrolling gesture on a trackpad or mousewheel is associated with the intent of moving upwards or downwards. Instead, our users were surprised to see a "zoom and pinch" effect that stretched and expanded the Timeline instead of moving along a y-axis.
"I'm scrolling down but it's not allowing me to continue down on the timeline."
"It took me a while to know how to interact with this."
04/04. Hidden browser extension icon due to Chrome update
In order to save real-estate on the extensions menu, Chrome unpins newly installed extensions by default, thereby hiding stateful signifiers by which users would normally refer and interact. Our users were confused most of the time and were not able to access important features because they couldn't access the extension icon in the menubar.
"If the acciyo extension were here, I would be able to click on it."
"Acciyo gets left behind, it's difficult. It's easy for people to forget what they've downloaded. It's easy to forget."