Unfold

A bit of curiosity

Last year in the middle of the confinement I was curious to know which were the most popular apps among young people (centennials). In the list of apps offered by Fortune magazine appeared Unfold. That's how I decided to make it a case study.

Overview

People like to be told stories. One very popular modality is social media stories. 
Unfold is an application for creating stories for social media. It offers templates, stickers and image and text editing tools.

The App is stylish and simple, but sometimes it causes confusion when using it. Some problems I found are:

• Some icons miscommunicate the function behind them.

• Create a story after taking a picture with the function camera

• Labeling of elements

• Communication of premium features

Together with other designers we evaluated the app as experts with a cognitive walkthrough. Then individually I conducted a more detailed user test, to examine people's experience using the app and propose improvements. The following are the stages of the evaluation.

Behind the scenes

Most people think about evaluating a product, they usually think only about the moment when a person evaluates a product with a user. We imagine a room, a computer, a facilitator and maybe the typical plant in the corner of the room. 

What we don't keep in mind is the work behind the evaluation, preparing the test and after the evaluation, as we are analyzing and synthesizing the results. It is like going to a restaurant, we only have in mind the dish in front of us, but we have no idea how the food got there, the magic that happens in the kitchen and of course we have little idea of what happens after our visit to the place.

Result

The outcome is a report prepared with the results of the test. To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I can’t present the report. But I have prepared a visual summary of the evaluation and the results.

Do I recommend a usability evaluation?

After conducting the test I realized that a usability evaluation requires a lot of resources, but it is a worthwhile process, because it gives an x-ray not only of the things that work well, but also of the problems, their severity and leads to concrete decision making. I absolutely recommend the usability evaluation.

The images used are from the website of Unfold and Spacesquare.