Mango health
Mango Health is an application for people who need some way to keep track of the medications they are taking, general medical activity (ex: doctors appointments), as well as overall medical levels (ex: blood pressure, daily mood). The purpose of the study was to find user preference on menu placement within the app. View Full Report.
My Contributions: Usability testing, Data analysis, Production and edits of research paper (purpose, test objective, task list, results, findings and recommendations)
Test Objective
In our previous usability study on the Mango Health application, we found that participants kept trying to use the information on the main “Home” page to navigate the application instead of the bottom navigation bar. One participant also stated that they would much rather have something simpler, such as a hamburger menu, to use for navigating through the application. From these findings, we decided to do a comparison study on the two navigation types: 1. hamburger menu, 2. bottom bar navigation.
Alternative Hypo 1: We hypothesize that the hamburger navigation will be easier to use then the bottom bar navigation.
Alternative Hypo 2: We also hypothesize that the task will be completed quicker when using the hamburger navigation then the bottom bar navigation.
Methods
Participants
| Female | Male | |
|---|---|---|
| Participants | 4 | 6 |
| Age Range | 23-49 | 24-50 |
| Average comfort level with smartphone (1=low, 7=high) | 6.3/7 | 5/7 |
| Average medications taken in past week | 2 | 1.4 |
Test design
In this within-subjects study, each participant completed the same task for Treatment A and B. Five participants started with treatment A and five started with treatment B. Our test session was a maximum of 10 minutes long.
Tasks List
Task for both Treatment A and B:
Starting from the phone's home page, Log into the Mango Health application
Evaluation measures
To understand the usability test the following were collected:
Participant demographics
All tasks will be timed individually
Follow-up question will contain a question on the ease of use for each treatment
We will use two-tailed t-tests to compare the average ease of use as well as the average times for each treatment
Results
The following table gives a breakdown of the average time taken and ease of use score for each task and the confidence interval for each.
| Task A (Hamburger menu) | Task B (Bottom bar menu) | |
|---|---|---|
| Average time taken to complete in seconds | 50.4 | 47.2 |
| Confidence Interval for mean at 95% (time on task) | 22.63 to 78.13 | 21.37 to 73.07 |
| Average tak difficulty (1=very hard, 7=very easy) | 4.4 | 4.3 |
| Confidence Interval for mean at 95% (difficulty) | 2.85 to 5.95 | 3.33 to 5.27 |
To examine the two groups we performed a two tailed t test. We found there was no statistical difference in ease of use for the two navigation types (t(18)=.11, P = .92). There was also no statistical difference with time on task for the two navigation types (t(18)=.17, P = .87).
Findings and Recommendations
Participant Pool
After analyzing the results from the usability tests, we found that there was no difference in ease of use and time on task between the two navigation types. From these findings we can speculate as to why there is no preference between the two navigation types. Our study only had a sample size of 10 and all participants in our study stated that they had a higher than average level of comfort when using a smartphone. A study with a larger participant pool or participants that were not as comfortable with smartphones may show one navigation style to be easier to use.
Test design
Our study utilized a within subjects design which may have affected the results even with counter balancing. Any further study would also benefit from using a between subjects design as using within subjects may have affected the results for their second task.
At this point we can only recommend further research utilizing targeted demographics, a larger participant pool, and a between subjects design.