DICE is one of the leading mobile applications for events and ticketing. Popular in big cities such as New York, DICE connects fans with artists, venues, and events seamlessly, and creates a singular platform for tickets and reservations, as well as community building. This project uses the Heuristic Evaluation method to examine the use of DICE by young adults looking for free or cheap events happening in the near future. Key issues were identified and addressed to improve browsing, searching, and sharing functions.
Heuristic Evaluation
User Research
UX Design
Content Strategy
Figma
FigJam
Google Workspace
Miro
DURATION3 weeks
(Experts Evaluations by Michaela Jackson, Sam Raddatz, & Marko Stanisic)
With a goal of reshaping the ticketing industry for fans, artists, and venues, the DICE iOS mobile app provides an all-inclusive interface for finding and buying tickets. It offers a range of search features to find a variety of events such as live music, festivals, parties, raves, comedy nights, and more. Additionally, its design also includes an element of community building and engagement with friends, where users can follow each other, as well as venues and artists.
In young adult communities of New York City, DICE is popularly used to find cheap or free events to attend within a short timeframe (tonight, this week, this weekend). Our team of evaluators thought it was important that this function could be performed easily, efficiently, and promptly, to ensure a smooth experience. This includes evaluating the following functions: includes navigation of the application, utilizing the various browsing and search features for events, sorting and filtering events according to preferences, sharing events with friends, and seamless viewing and ticketing for an event.
After a thorough exploration of DICE’s iOS interface, we set goals to improve the UI/UX of the mobile application. The goal of this study was to identify specific problems related to the browse and search task being examined, understand the crux of the problem and its impacts, and present a solution to improve the usability of the interface. Our process is outlined below:
- Recruit expert evaluators
- Define the scope of the study
- Define the task steps to guide evaluators through the workflow
- Experts conduct individual evaluations of the interface
- Identify usability problems
- Ask for explanations and severity rating for problems identified
- Develop solutions for identified problems
- Create high-fidelity prototypes for demonstration
- Synthesize process, findings, and recommendations as a report
- Lead evaluator complies usability problems
- Prioritize critical problems to solve
- Brainstorm solutions to identified problems
After conducting the heuristic evaluation, issues identified by experts were recorded and prioritized. A total of 10 usability problems were identified with the interface. We prioritized issues based on two main factors: the severity of the problem and the number of heuristics it violated. These major issues were then selected for further examination.
To address these usability problems, we developed a series of recommendations outlined below. Each of the reommendations addresses multiple of the 10 usability problems we found. There are designed to provide clear guidance and improve the overall user experience of the DICE iOS mobile application.
Improve discoverability by expanding the Sort By feature on Events List pages
Differentiate between the Share and Invite features to encourage community building
Standardize event labels for improved browsing
To achieve our set goals by the end of our design process, we created high-fidelity prototypes to demonstrate our proposed solutions to problems identified through the research process.
RECOMMENDATION 01:
IMPROVE DISCOVERABILITY BY EXPANDING THE SORT BY FEATURE ON LIST PAGES
THE PROBLEMA critical issue we encountered is with the limitations and inconsistencies of the ‘Sort By’ feature on DICE’s events list pages.
OUR RECOMMENDATIONThe Sort By option provided by DICE is crucial to the user’s browsing of events offered. Therefore, the function should include all sorting options that could be helpful to the user. The proposed solution for this standardizing the Sort By feature across all list pages.
If a page does not allow for sorting by content, include the feature, but gray out unusable options. Additionally, provide for sorting by price to add another layer of browsing for the user.
RECOMMENDATION 02:
DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN THE SHARE & THE INVITE FEATURES TO ENCOURAGE COMMUNITY BUILDING
THE PROBLEMThe Share/Invite feature for individual events is a crucial function for community building and engagement on DICE. However, we noticed that there was a duplication in function with these features.
OUR RECOMMENDATION
The Share/Invite feature for individual events is a crucial function for community building and engagement on DICE. While you can share events, DICE also has some features where users can follow each other.
Therefore, our recommendation would be to separate the two features, making the Invite feature more formal and only for the DICE community, while the share feature helps send events to friends and more.
RECOMMENDATION 03:
STANDARDIZE EVENT LABELS FOR IMPROVED BROWSING
THE PROBLEMDICE’s event labels are important for recognition of event type. They play an important roll right from the Home Page in enhancing event browsing according to user preferences. We found an inconsistency in these labels and those attributed to individual events that may hinder usability.
OUR RECOMMENDATIONWhile “gigs” is a common colloquialism used in the world of events, it is an ambiguous label for categorization in DICE. The label shows up in isolation on event specific pages only, therefore making user wonder what the label means.
Standardization of labels is extremely important for DICE’s interface. Our recommendation is to fold events with the label “gigs” into the category Shows to provide standardization and consistency across the interface.
Heuristic Evaluation is a widely implemented usability evaluation technique in the design industry. This methodology includes utilizing a set of guidelines (called heuristics) appropriate to the interface in question to recognize and identify usability problems that users may encounter. This study utilized Jakob Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics for User Interaction Design which specifically identifies 10 heuristics that are important to consider when designing the user interfaces.
This evaluation method was chosen because heuristic evaluation relies on testing and feedback from a set of design experts. In comparison to user testing, which relies on users, heuristic evaluations can be performed quickly and efficiently, leading to problems that violate the set of heuristics an interface is tested against, and therefore implementable recommendations and solutions.
Each evaluator was provided with the same task and asked to individually evaluate DICE’s interface against to compile a list of usability issues that violate Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics. They were asked to explain the problem, how it violates a heuristic, and give it a severity rating to prioritize problems. To learn more about Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics and how to conduct a heuristic evaluation, click here!
The table below shows the collected problem descriptions, with the heuristics each violated, evaluator ratings for each problem, and an average severity rating. By conducting research on DICE’s interface using UX experts, collating their feedback, and analyzing recurring patterns, we found the following pain points for user experience. These insights were crucial in helping us create appropriate solutions.
By implementing our proposed solutions into high-fidelity mock-ups, we created the final prototype seen below to visualize the recommended changes to the DICE iOS mobile application.
Heuristic evaluation is one of many different effective usability testing methods. It is important to identify which evaluation method would be best suited to a proposed project/problem, in addition to being able to justify why. This is a judgement skills improved with practice, and I hope to be able to make informed decisions moving forward.
Writing & Synthesis
Synthesizing a project into a report and case study is a skill enhanced with practice. UX Writing as well as communicative writing are skills that I am constantly developing. This project in particular challenged me to tell the project’s story in a unique and innovative manner, and I hope to continue sharpening my skills as a UX professional.
As part of the project, our team wrote a usability report that details our strategy, process, findings, and recommendations thoroughly, as a reference for Pratt Libraries.
VIEW REPORT