Skybox
Skybox offers group fitness classes and personal training sessions to help individuals find a much needed balance in their everyday lives. Skybox prides itself on being diverse and welcoming; their slogan is “here, you belong.”
MY ROLE
UX Researcher | Usability Testing Moderator and Observer | UX Designer
Overview
Skybox approached my team to solve usability problems with their current website and make recommendations based on the findings that were uncovered using evaluative methods.
KEY DELIVERABLES
PROCESS WORK
METHODS
Heuristic Analysis | Usability Testing | Think-aloud Protocol | Affinity Diagramming | Low fidelity Wireframes
TOOLS
Figma | Figjam | Google Sheets | Google Slides | Zoom
Problem Statement
The current Skybox website has several usability problems that hinder the ability of users to successfully navigate the website and book classes. Skybox would like its digital website to communicate their values and be usable when completing necessary tasks, such as purchasing classes, so that people in the area can experience their open and welcoming environment and be encouraged to reach their health and wellness goals.
By creating a better digital experience, Skybox will be able to spread its message to more users and have a better chance at retaining those who visit the site.
Although Skybox’s overall message is one of inclusion, the website potentially excludes users by creating unnecessary workarounds and obstacles when users navigate the site and attempt to book a class.
Usability Issues
After being made aware of the problem and identifying user groups, my team and I began usability test planning. In this stage of the process, we drafted the goals of our usability test, key tasks that we would need users to complete while testing, and we also created scenarios that helped put the tasks into context so that participants could imagine themselves using the website in a realistic way.
After our initial draft, we individually conducted a usability review of Skybox’s website in order to determine baseline usability problems. I used Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics and identified several problems.
The biggest issues I encountered were issues with booking a class, issues with pricing, and a lack of interconnectedness between web pages.
Booking classes is integral to Skybox’s business model and this issue severely violated many of Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics.
Usability Testing
The usability test sessions were conducted over Zoom and we tested a total of 10 participants. I had the opportunity to serve as both an observer and also as a moderator.
We found common pain points across our tests and identified the most severe issues that Skybox should address.
Me moderating a usability testing session.
A user expressed dissatisfaction with lack of clarity regarding different pricing plans and options; both in terms of layout and language.
Synthesizing raw data
After the testing sessions, my group and I debriefed and we talked through the testing results and the raw data that we collected. We used a Miro board to organize our insights together and collect all of the observations from testing. This board was a useful visual for synthesizing the abundant amount of raw data we had collected and helped us further identify severe issues that users encountered during usability testing.
This synthesis helped guide my thinking and gave me my first steps for my findings and recommendations that I would share with our client.
A Miro board that my team and I used to synthesize all of the raw data from the usability testing sessions.
Final Solutions
I then wrote a Findings and Recommendations report to be reviewed by the client. In this detailed report, I identified the most common findings that were discovered across the usability tests and gave recommendations so that these user problems would not occur in the future.
In particular, users were having difficulty booking a class and had issues determining the pricing.
By fixing these issues, the usability of Skybox’s website should be improved and users will have a better experience with the website in general.
Next Steps and Learnings
I think that our testing went well but I would have liked more time to do usability testing. This would give us more user data and give users more time to explore the site. We had 6 tasks and our testing sessions were only 30 minutes, so users could not spend too much time on a particular task.
I think that if we had done more usability testing and had longer usability testing sessions, we would have been able to uncover even more problems with the website and could have given an even more thorough evaluation.