Motivation
As part of my Human Computer Interaction certificate, I had to work with a client to perform a usability study on one of their projects. I signed up to work with Microsoft, so that I would have a chance to perform a usability study in their state of the art labs. Up to this point, I had only done studies at start ups, so being able to perform a study with the resources of a big company was a great learning opportunity.
Approach
The goal of the study was to see if the most recent release of Skype for Business mobile had improved upon the previous version from a usability and customer satisfaction standpoint. I also wanted to see which features users had the most difficulty figuring out.
With the help of Microsoft's screening vendor, myself and my two teammates gathered ten participants who use some form of digital team communication tools at work outside of email or Skype for Business, and ran them each through ten realistic scenarios. We did our best to make these scenarios as realistic as possible. After each scenario, I asked the participants to rate their satisfaction with the core tasks that enabled them to complete their scenario and compared them to the previous benchmark. Microsoft has asked that I not share these numbers with the public, so they have been omitted from the presentation below.
Each participant was in the lab for two hours, during which we asked them questions about their jobs and how text, phone, and video communication applies to each of them before the scenarios and probed them for general thoughts on Skype for Business after the scenarios. After we finished the study, we compiled a report and highlight videos for Microsoft, which we then presented to the heads of product and engineering for Skype for Business mobile.
Findings
For the most part, we found that the app worked pretty well and users did not have a hard time using basic features such as instant messaging and one-on-one calls. However, we did find several glaring usability issues with notifications, group video calls, and scheduled meetings. For instance, errors show up in the same place as notifications, but on a higher plane, and stay in place until they are dismissed by the user. This causes users to frequently miss notifications. We also found that a significant segment of participants did not attempt to add users to a video call in the way Skype supports.
At the end of our presentation, we highlighted the most important issues Skype for Business should consider fixing.
The full list of findings are outlined in the report below.
Report
Team:
André Wyatt
Nathan Hedin
Clara Jauquet