38 UX Issues in a Secure Mobile Messaging App Found and Fixed in Just 3 Weeks
Customer
The Customer is a European IT company that provides secure mobile messaging solutions.
Challenge
The Customer had a fully developed, encrypted mobile messenger. Before rolling it out on the market, the Customer wanted to make sure that the future users would be fully content with using the app.
Solution
The Customer asked ScienceSoft to perform a UX audit and ScienceSoft’s business analyst completed the task in 1 week. The audit comprised 5 stages:
- Analysis of the key user scenarios in the Customer’s app.
- Analysis of competitor messenger apps (Viber, WhatsApp, Telegram).
- Pinpointing presentation, navigation, and control usage issues in the key user scenarios of the Customer’s app.
- Finding the most effective solutions to the uncovered issues (based on the UX data collected in rival messenger apps).
- Creating an audit report.
The report classified 38 uncovered issues as either usability errors, wording mistakes, or UI defects. Depending on how much it disturbed the user flow, each error was also given a fixing priority level: critical (2), serious (17), and minor (19). One of the critical issues, for instance, was the missing possibility to recover a forgotten password when logging in the app.
In the report, our BA provided detailed recommendations on how to properly handle each issue and illustrated all recommendations with either examples from popular messenger apps or original prototypes.
Results
Upon receiving the audit report, the Customer asked ScienceSoft to implement all the provided recommendations. In 2 weeks, ScienceSoft’s team fixed all the issues and the Customer released the app, which was warmly welcomed by the audience.
Methodologies and Tools
Jakob Nielsen UX heuristics, features and workflow assessment.
