This week I chose the topic for my assignment 3, and we did the heuristic evaluation for it. I chose Emily Ong's project: Touraround.
I decided to choose this project because of our current social situation. Because of COVID, social interactions and meetings have drastically reduced, and this has led to increasing feelings of loneliness and hopelessness in some people. it doesn’t seem like the virus is clearing up anytime soon, so i think it’s the right time to start thinking about the future of social interactions in physical spaces. I think touraround has the potential of becoming a really interesting platform that could push people to get out of their comfort zones, explore the places around them, and feel a sense of connection with their community, while also being able to this safely.
I also think it has a lot of growth potential with additional features such as completing challenges and dares or following clues to unlock certain information (the dares and clues could be set up by other users whenever they post something in the app). I think this feature would make the app much more exciting for users, and it would encourage them to come back to it, because of the exciting element of surprise.
This project is very well established visually, it has a minimalistic colour pallet, and it is very simple and straight forward to use. Through my evaluation I found some minor aesthetic characteristics that I would change, such as the alienated use of pink and green in just specific screens. I would either incorporate those 2 colours into more screens or get rid of them all together and stick to the black-white-yellow colour scheme.
In terms of actual functionality, there were some flaws (most likely because of the short timeline of this project). The biggest flaw I found was the lack of a profile page, as I believe this app should definitely require a sign-up process to be able to post and comment on people’s posts. This would also be necessary for archiving posts, and specially for the badge feature, since on the current prototype there is no way to access your previously won badges unless you just won another one. I think this feature would also encourage users to come back to the app, since they would feel a sense of accomplishment the more badges they collect. i know initially the idea behind not having profiles was the anonymity aspect, but I think this could be a feature of its own. Users should be able to choose whether their post is anonymous or not.
Another issue i found was a lack of confirmation screens and back buttons throughout the app. Users also cannot delete posts or save drafts (another use for the profile page), On the map, if they have clicked on AR map, they cannot go back to the regular map. I think i will need to rethink the structure of the app better to allow for user’s to be able to go back just one step whenever they make a mistake, instead of having to repeat the whole user flow every time.
In general, the app is fairly well fleshed out, with some usability concerns that would have been addressed had we had more time. I do think that there is a lot of room for improvement to make this app more unique and exciting to use. Like I mentioned before, i think the way to do this is by incorporating things such as dares, clues and easter eggs into the app, I this gamification would encourage people to come back to the app to win more badges and discover new places, since there would be an added layer of mystery that surrounds it. Popular apps such as tik tok do this well, the use of trends and sounds that other people can imitate
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