Usability Benchmarking Tool (UBT)

UBT was already shipped in two versions. But there were still issues that weren't yet solved for.

I compiled most of the the problem the team found in previous research sessions, and then analyzed those issues and delivered corresponding product opportunities in the following user journey map. This helped to drive decisions when creating UBT V3 designs.

People were having hesitancies about completing a task, leading to higher cancel rates: Previous UBT designs limited data collection to simple, low social consequence tasks. This plateaued the team's learning and put important partnerships at risk with UI quality with UI Quality council and other product teams.

Make UBT more usable: Similarly to moderated usability testing, we need to ensure users feel satisfaction regardless of their ability to complete a task successfully. Since usability benchmarking is a new concept for many users, UBT's purpose need to be more clearly understood in order to gather proper consent. With increased understanding and intention, we can decrease the number of task bails that are a result of general confusion about the tool/experience.

The tool was only available on iOS: We were exhausting our current survey pool, limiting data collection to a few markets, and blocking team operations and learning. Not having Android support also put important partnerships at risk with UI quality with UI Quality council and other product teams.

The tool was only available in English: We were exhausting our current survey pool, limiting data collection to a few markets, and blocking team operations and learning. Not having translations support also put important partnerships at risk with UI quality with UI Quality council and other product teams.

A task with social consequence (SC) can be defined for concern for activities that might have social repercussions. For example, "Comment on Someone's Post" in Newsfeed is one of the high SC activities. Users may quit the activity because they don't want to comment on their friends' posts, due to their own privacy concerns or simply not wanting to do a task that can be seen by others just because FB asks them to do so.

In the new design, I made use of success marker to mitigate for SC. Previously, our team had already set at least one success marker in order to enable our system to automatically detect whether a user has completed the activity successfully. Take the activity, Comment on Someone's Post, as an example. the success marker is triggers once users click on the comment glyph as follows. So they don't need to actually publish the comment to complete this activity.

Therefore, I decided to mitigate for SC by giving users option to not publish the comment after they reach the success marker. Here's the new design:

Work on a cross-functional team: I collaborated with my peer partners of this intern project(content strategist, UX researcher, engineers, project manager, data scientists, and my mentor) in an efficient way. I joined Usability Team, UIQInitiatives, UIQ Initiatives Design Team and design critique regularly, reported my work and received feedbacks. This gives me a senses of being a part of these teams.

Improve my professional skills: I experienced a relatively complete process of product design by conducting design exploration, user testing, iteration and building specs. This enabled me to improve my professional skills through a real project in the industry. Besides, the intern project matched my skills and interests pretty well. I was able to harnessed my strength of product thinking and tackle the problems our team meets with at system level.

Meet and exceed the original project expectation: I committed to the originally project plan pretty close. I met all five milestones and we never changed any deadline. Previous UBT designs limited data collection to simple, low social consequence tasks. This plateaued the team learning and put important partnerships at risk with UI Quality council and other product teams. My original project plan was to mitigate for social consequence through design and user research. The new design successfully achieved the project goal, so our team finally launched it on Facebook. Besides, it also exceeded the original expectation by making the impact mentioned in the "Challenge" session.