Have you ever thought about the people who design the applications you use on your phone and how they work to make it look and work correctly? Well, in this the term usability has a lot to say and teach. Simply put, usability refers to the speed and ease with which people carry out their tasks through the use of a product of interest. Concatenated with this, it can also be stated that usability implies focusing on users.

We can say that usability rests on two major pillars:

• Direct contact with the user: to develop a product that is used by the target audience, behavioral patterns must be analyzed and understood
• Knowledge of the usability context: a product is successful in terms of usability depending on the number of steps it has to take for the person to meet their objectives. One of the steps prior to the development of an app, it is very convenient to know in advance which user tasks the new product automates, modifies or enhances.

Don't forget: it is the users who determine whether a product is easy to use or not. Designers and developers only carry out their work of interpretation and implementation.

ZARA app and its level of usability

An expert in UX design and usability - called Guillermo NG - had a wonderful idea: carry out an austere but necessary social experiment, together with a group of store assistants Zara and the addition of samples from people classified as frequent customers of the Spanish brand. The main idea was to detect current flaws within the visual and functional panel of the mobile application and then establish a series of graphic modifications that would expose effective solutions that would resolve these issues.

Final number of testers for the experiment: seven.

Level zero of this work consisted of research and online data collection so that a buyer persona could be created for the Zara app. Detailed data such as age, occupation and socioeconomic level made up the current identikit: professionals between 20 and 30 years of age with a medium-high income level.

Likewise, the study of the environment in which these people move during their interaction with the app was another important point. Whether because the person wants to be constantly fashionable or because they simply want to search for items - online - that have already been sold in physical stores, all types of arguments are valid to understand what their motivations and expected results are.

I'm trying it

Once the proto-person and its behavior were defined, the next step was to return to those seven testers to carry out the field work. Here the attendees had to imagine certain contexts and act accordingly: "It's been cold lately and you're looking for a winter coat. What do you do?"; You see a coat you might like, can you explain to me how you would decide if this is a coat for you? “You added the coat to your cart but you realize the size is wrong. How do you fix that?”

A review of the data obtained was carried out and then the affinity mapping technique was used to classify the weaknesses to be resolved into categories. Shopping cart, search engine and filter, “save for later”, image carousel, unavailable items and the drop-down menu, were the most “challenging” items for this researcher, configuring the most visible pain points.

Assuming that the most important objective of the app is to increase mobile revenue, it was decided that the editing of cart items was an issue that required urgent usability redesign for both Zara and users.

Challenge ahead

When trying to edit an item in the cart:

• Only 1 in 7 did it without problem
• 6 out of 7 users touched the element, which only shows an image
• 4 out of 7 users tried to swipe left on the item, which doesn't show the edit option
• 2 out of 7 users accidentally deleted their items

At the time of putting creativity and intelligence on the table, Guillermo began the creation of design prototypes, carrying out a preliminary validation based on sketches with some online buyers. Thanks to this, the researcher obtained more information, managing to incorporate more solutions into the final design.

As color information for our readers in relation to this first step, at Lab9 we work for Innos - a mobile application willing to provide solutions in the health area -, carrying out a prior study focused on the brand's stakeholders to know what their needs, preferences and behavioral patterns were. From the information collected, we were able to differentiate the useful data and then begin to make the first manual sketches, which would later be digitized to be presented as a final proposal.

One of the big modifications had to do with the new “Edit” button, which replaces the “buy later” button. In this new function, users can not only choose the garment they are going to buy but can also change their mind regarding the color, size and quantity of items.

Before the usability redesign, when users intended to save an item for later, they could only do so when the item was already in the shopping cart. For this reason Guillermo believes that it would be more appropriate to add the “save for later” function to the product search flow so that users do not have to move an item to the cart before checking it.

Another design change involved an interaction guide for users so that they could move the carousel images in a pattern similar to the other finger movements that must be done in the rest of the app. In this case, vertically and not horizontally as before.

In closing, validation is the last step of any mobile usability redesign. On this occasion, the 7 testers were asked to explain in their own words how they would edit the quantity and size of the items in the cart. Result? Absolutely everyone was able to explain these points successfully. Thus, the effective solution rate went from 33% to 100%.