Literal App Case Study
By: Miah Dawes
Tags: User Testing, Ux Case Study, UX, UX Research, Interaction Design

UX Design

Project Summary

Literal is a mobile app that intends to improve the reading habits in teenagers by presenting novels in a text messaging format, rather than in the traditional format of a standard book. The goal of this two-week project was to recommend ways in which Literal could improve the usability of their mobile application. After narrowing down pain points in Literal’s prototype, several specific features were devised, tested, and proposed to Literal to help improve the user experience of their product.

My Role

As a member of Brigham Young University’s Studio UX (a UX consulting group), I collaborated with a team of seven students to test and research Literal’s prototype. After conducting an initial analysis with the entire group to flesh out user pain points, we broke off into teams of two to devise solutions. I worked with a partner to devise, test, and analyze a way to improve how the narrator was presented in a story within the Literal application.

Methodology

Diary Study

In order to understand Literal and discover ideas and potential problems, we performed a diary study. The diary study was essentially a usability test over three days. At the beginning of each day we asked the users to perform certain tasks and then read until they were bored, and then at the end of each day we sent a follow up survey to learn about each person’s experience with the app. The participants in the diary study included everyone on the project team as well as several of our friends and family. We focused specifically on those who were in Literal’s target demographic: teenagers between the ages of thirteen and seventeen.

Modified Affinity Cluster

After completing the diary study, we used a modified affinity cluster to help identify and group the result of the study into common themes and potential pain points for further testing.

From our affinity cluster, we chose to focus on three main categories of research: narration format, navigation method, and a social reaction feature.

Affinity Cluster

Narration Solution

I chose to focus on the problem evident from our initial diary study that the narration in many novels is very long, and not particularly well suited for the conversational format of text messaging. As the purpose of the app is to present novels in a broken-up format that is easier for teenagers to read, I decided that I should try and break up the narration into smaller pieces, sometimes even breaking long sentences into multiple messages. This could potentially make long bits of narration less daunting towards readers if they could visualize them in smaller steps at a time.

Narration Testing

I decided to conduct a series of A/B tests to determine as to whether readers preferred long sections of narration in less messages, or broken up into more messages. The prototypes are shown below.

Our two prototypes. On the right, we broke up narration text.

Interviewing five users, I showed three of them the initial prototype (left) first, and then the other prototype (right) afterwards. I then asked to which they preferred. For the other two users, I switched the order in which I showed them the prototypes. I then asked them a series of questions to determine how they were able to comprehend the story and how they preferred to read.

Testing Analysis

The results of our testing showed that ⅕ users preferred the long blocks of text, ⅖ users were indifferent, and ⅖ preferred the short blocks of text. Reasons for preferring the long chunks were that it felt too broken up and flowed less naturally when cut into smaller pieces. Reasons for preferring the shorter chunks of text were that it was closer to reading a text conversation where messages are typically shorter. From these tests, it was concluded that there was a slight preference over the shorter messages than the longer ones.

Conclusion

For the narration format, I discovered that users slightly preferred long chunks of text broken up into shorter excerpts. However, another group of Studio UX students tested navigation methods in the app and whether users preferred a tap to a scrolling method to parse through messages. My A/B test was only conducted using a scrolling method and not a tapping method. Since the results of this test could potentially be different considering a tap navigation method, more testing in conjunction with alternate navigation methods was recommended.