Fridge Usability Testing

This originally appeared in my HCDE 210 process blog (syklla.wordpress.com), this was my first experience with Usability Testing in my freshman year of college.

For this Sprint we were learning about usability testing. We did a practice user test on water bottles in the studio to get a hang of it. My teammate, Leena and I tested the usability of a mini-fridge. The users we choose were one who is very familiar with the fridge (my roommate), one who was somewhat familiar with the fridge (a friend who is very often in the room) and one who is not at all familiar with the fridge (a friend who is only occasionally in the room and doesn’t use the fridge). The tasks we tested were finding a cucumber in the fridge, cleaning the fridge and storing leftovers in the fridge. The data we collected was the time it took for the task, the number of items the user had to move to complete the task and the user’s thoughts during the task. It was very fun and interesting to watch the users complete the tasks, especially seeing how different people approached the tasks given.

Here is the video of our presentation –

This raised questions about the decisions that designers made for the fridge. Why did they divide it up the way they did? There is one part of the fridge which is very single purpose. It only is designed to hold soda cans. In my opinion a better design would be a shelf that could hold soda cans but is more functional for other food storage. The things that I would do differently is space out the user’s tests more. Because of the close times we gave them we needed to rush to reset the tasks and the other users were present for the tests of those after them.

I enjoyed this project very much. It was fun seeing how people’s responses were different to what we expected. I also like the idea of user testing. Finding the flaws in a product would be a very fun job. I think that User Testing might be an area of HCDE that I want to pursue as a career, but I would need to work on my poker face.

This type of work is important because without it products would have to relay on chance and there understanding of the user they are targeting to ensure this success. A scenario that user testing is essential is in the tech industry. You can have a great idea, but if you don’t test it out with real users before you release it, it will never be successful. As the panel spoke about in our lecture, even if you have a great idea that is feasible and desirable, it still needs to be usable.