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Project Overview
Challenge: Select an application and redesign an aspect of it to avoid or mitigate errors. Designers need to design for error. This means both to reduce the opportunities to make errors and to accept that people will make errors and provide ways to mitigate their impact and recover from them.
Time: 2 weeks Tools: Figma, Adobe Illustrator Team: Jasmine Tran, Colin Isidro, Evelyn Huang, Kaitlyn Butcher
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With the growing prevalence of online communication, there have been many apps created to allow for ease of connection with others, but none have become as popular as Discord. With almost 200 million active users monthly, Discord has become a top app, employed by a variety of groups for different purposes including gaming, school, and socializing. We decided to look at the Discord mobile app specifically for the purposes of this project.
What are some of the features that set it apart from other messaging apps? Can users easily afford these features? Do those features create any trade-offs?
We conducted 12 total interviews. During the interviews, we made sure that the participants were educated in the process, discussing how the interview process would go and also making sure that interviewees would be comfortable sharing their screens. We utilized the master-apprentice model in which we let the interviewees lead the conversation about their experiences with Discord. This allowed us to create a more welcoming environment as well as letting us gather more information about the participants’ backgrounds and experiences. On average, our interviews lasted around 5 minutes, depending on how familiar the users were with Discord.
On the left-hand column, our pre-task, task, and post-task questions are listed while the right-hand columns contain our interviewee’s responses. A glimpse at task performance during the interviews is depicted below.
Upon analyzing our interviews and observations, we identified five common errors that users made while interacting with the application. We categorized each error as either a slip or mistake.
Error #1: Finding the “Create Server” Option
The first error we identified was an action-based slip. The Design of Everyday Things describes a slip as a user having the correct goal in mind but with a flawed execution (pg. 190). An action-based slip specifically is when the user performs the wrong action.
5/12 users interviewed had struggles with locating the option to create a server. User #11 did not initially know where to go in order to complete this operation. He clicked through the various bottom tabs, as well as looking at the top of their server list, before scrolling to the bottom of the server list to find the plus icon that creates a server. This is an action-based slip as he had the goal of creating the server in mind, but performed incorrect actions in order to complete his goal.
Error #2: Screensharing
Another action-based slip that 4/12 users interviewed made was when they were tasked with joining a call and sharing their screen. Before locating the correct option, User #9 first clicked the “activity” button. This error and error #1 are due to the designers’ conceptual model that includes a less cluttered interface, which inadvertently causes the user to struggle with finding the specific feature in mind.