There’s always space for improvement
Or is it already good enough?
During the last semester studying Content Strategy at FH Joanneum, I took courses covering information architecture, interaction design and UX design.
Before starting this course, I did not have any actual knowledge in this field. Despite three years of studying design, these topics were never covered, and I have been looking forward to learning about them for a while.
These courses, together with learning about accessibility, taught me a lot about what goes on — or what should go on — behind the scenes of any website. And all of it should happen before getting to the visual side of things.
Even if we did not have enough time to learn in-depth about each field, I had the possibility to fully understand their importance. The work that goes behind designing the user’s experience is huge, but is so relevant for the user and can save a company so much money. Having a well-designed and thought-through user experience will not only make happy users the are more likely to become clients, but also save hours of customer support helping people that get lost in the digital product.
During the UX course, after some theoretical input, we jumped into practice. In teams of 5, we analyzed the Too Good To Go app. Some performed a thinking aloud test, others such as my group choose to carry on our analysis using Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics for Usability.
Performing the report took a lot of hours for the team, but we did not encounter many difficulties. The hard part came with putting together the findings — sometimes the heuristics overlapped each other, in other cases they were contradictory… and many things are subjective.
With the findings wrapped up in a short list, the next step was finding some solutions to the current design of the app. As a user, I must say the app is pretty good, and the feeling is that many of the problems we found were not easy to implement with a few changes here and there.
Taking design decisions is never easy, but it’s even harder when reviewing a product that… well, already looked pretty good, at least for me.
However, after some sketching and some rethinking of the app as a whole, a path to a different solution came up. What used to be two separate pages with overlapping information got merged into a single page, saving some frustration also for experienced users. This decision led to the possibility to rethink the way products are shown in the app, with changes that aim not at affecting both user categories of To Good To Go — the shop owners and the customers.
My main takeaway is that, even when something looks already pretty good, there’s for sure space for improvement, probably in unexpected ways. But before spiralling down in an endless loop in the search for perfection, maybe it’s better to understand: is it good enough?
The perfectionist in me is muddled.
Curious to learn more about UX design, or see other perspectives on the same project? Check out my teammates' posts — Rebecca wrote about the 10 heuristics, and Anna has three interesting insights from her experience.
