PROJECT Android Clock App
About
The Clock App is a default alarm, timer, world clock, and stopwatch application for Android smart-phones. Focusing on the alarm and timer modes, in this heuristic evaluation I analyze the app's interface task flows against Jakob Neilson's recognized usability principles.
Goal
Perform a cost-effective evaluation of the Clock App to find interaction problems and offer redesign solutions for future user testing.
Deliverables
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High fidelity mockups
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Heuristic evaluation and report
Tools
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Adobe Photoshop
Research
My based my evaluation on Jakob Nielson’s 10 heuristic principles of interaction design, a list of design principles based on 249 usability problems identified by his research group.
Read more about Nielson's heuristic principles:
Evaluation and Iteration
I started the evaluation by creating user tasks and attempting to complete them on the app. An example of a task: "Create an alarm to take medicine at 9:30am every weekday". I then systematically examined all of the app's interfaces and settings screen by screen, judging them against Nielson's heuristic principles to identify pain points.
Problem #1
Heuristic Principle: Visibility of system status
Task: In this sequence, the user is editing the alarm’s Snooze duration. When the Snooze duration button is pressed from the Alarm Edit Screen, the user is given a pop-up with Snooze duration options in the form of radio buttons.
Pain Point: When the user presses their desired Snooze duration, the user is immediately taken back to the Alarm Edit Screen and may wonder if their selection was actually registered. To get this confirmation, the user currently must search for the Snooze duration button again to see if the duration has been properly changed.
Solution #1
Redesign with radio-button feedback
In my redesign, the user is momentarily shown that the blue radio button has changed to their selected Snooze duration. Seeing this change will help to immediately confirm for users that the Snooze duration has been correctly changed. Rather than requiring the user to find their selection on the Alarm Edit Screen, this solution gives the user immediate and visible system status change.
Problem #2
Heuristic Principle: User control and freedom
Task: In this sequence, the user is setting the Alarm volume on the Alarm Edit Screen. When the user presses the alarm volume bar, the alarm begins playing in its entirety.
Pain Point: There is no indication that the alarm will begin playing when the volume is pressed so this interaction may surprise some users. Furthermore, the user is not given a control to stop the alarm once it has been pressed. A panicked user surprised by the loud sound may press the bottom “Cancel” button, which cancels the user out of the Alarm Edit screen altogether and takes them back to the Alarm Main Page.
In my redesign, a button to stop the alarm has been added beneath the slider to give users control over the alarm playing. This button is a light grey color when not actionable as to be less intrusive for the user. A red stop button (“Stop test”) becomes actionable when the alarm is playing.
Solution #2
Redesign with user control
Problem #3
Heuristic Principle: Consistency and standards, Error recognition, diagnosis and recovery.
Task: This sequence shows the Timer function of the Clock App. The user presses the timer numbers on the Main Screen in order to set the time. Once the timer has started, the user can reset the timer or stop it in the count-down screen. In this scenario, the user has stopped the timer because they want to change the timer to 25 minutes.
Pain Point: The user may think that they can press the timer numbers to edit the timer as they did in on the Timer Main Screen (left-most screen). However, the timer numbers are not actionable on the Timer Stopped Screen. Inconsistency in when the timer is an actionable button is likely to cause confusion for users. If the user wants to edit the timer, they must first press the “Reset” button, but the user is left to determine this themselves without guidance from the system as to how to solve this user error.
Solution #3
Redesign with consistent interaction
In this redesigned interaction, the user is taken to the Time Edit Screen after pressing on the timer, just as happens when the user first pressed the timer to edit it. This solution would best match the user’s expectations for how they can interact with the Clock App.
