Assignment 5 Alpha

Heuristic evaluation

Learnability:

Overall, the labeled buttons and layout makes it easy for users to understand how to navigate and use the interface. However, it may not be clear to users what happens after they accept or decline a reading invitation from a friend. An improvement to make, then, may be to incorporate clear feedback to the user after they have selected an option: when they accept, for instance, they should be notified of the resulting synced actions (that the book has been added to their Currently Reading folder and that their friend has been notified). Additionally, another aspect that could potentially confuse users at first might be the rating action: with the current setup, it may not be clear that users need to add a book to their Read folder before they can then rate it; one option may be to provide a separate Rate button that automatically adds the book to their Read folder and enables users to go straight to rating the book.

Pleasantness:

Although the layouts in the Home and user profile pages are relatively minimalistic, the book page could potentially be overwhelming to users. Possible improvements could include utilizing more icons instead of text, or implementing a dropdown for the book description instead of displaying it in its entirety. One tradeoff in optimizing for this, however, may be that making these changes could sacrifice increases in efficiency (making all the functionality immediately visible/accessible to users).

Gestalt principles:

The clear groupings in the Home page indicate related parts and help users identify what actions they can take. However, one improvement in the app may be to separate functionality in the Book page more clearly; for instance, the invitation button may be hard to distinguish from the folder buttons. This could be achieved by increasing the spacing between them or making them different colors.

Situational context:

The labeled tabs at the tops of most the pages help indicate to users where they currently are. However, it may be helpful to include breadcrumbs at the top of the Book page: it could potentially be unclear to users which page they should travel to next.

User’s language (and consistency):

I decided to change the name of “Bookbag” in my UI to “Recommendations” to ensure simplicity and avoid confusing users. Additionally, another improvement could be in clarifying the difference between reading invitations and friend invitations by making the reading invitations language and purpose clearer and calling friend invitations “requests” instead.

Information scent:

Including the total number of books in many of the lists throughout the app (recommendations, what friends are reading) makes it easy for users to view important information at a glance. However, it may also be useful to include these total numbers in the book galleries in user profiles. Additionally, it may also be helpful to indicate book ratings up front (instead of just the cover/title) so that users don’t have to click into each book just to see what they or other users thought of it. A tradeoff here, however, is between information scent and pleasantness: an increase in this information shown can potentially make the app more cluttered, overwhelming users.

Deployed website: https://bookclub-frontend-seven.vercel.app

Link to code: https://github.com/juliacamacho/bookclub-frontend

(Concepts implemented: Recommendation, Book (partially))