Mobile Research Project Plan

Before starting the Kent State program, I had some experience working on a mobile project from beginning to end while at Vistaprint. This deliverable outlines a proposal for creating a mobile research testing environment for in-person, moderated sessions. Some of the graphics were slightly modified from the original plan my former manager, Kirk Doggett, drew up when planning to build the new Vistaprint lab experience.

The Problem

The company you work for has a great web site that used to meet the needs of most of its users. That was enough until almost everyone started using phones and tablets to look up products, services, locations and price. The analytics team at your company was surprised to see that in the past year 15% of the company traffic is iPad, 20% is iPhone and 20% is Android. So now over half of all of the company web traffic is on mobile devices.

Everyone just assumed that the current web site would scale properly on mobile devices and that people would be able to get what they needed. Unfortunately that’s not the case. The customer support center is getting inundated with calls concerning problems finding information while trying to use the desktop site on a mobile browser.

It’s time to fix this. So the company has decided that it needs to create a responsive design that adjusts to device type and screen resolution or work on dedicated apps for iOS and Android. But first they want to do some testing on mobile devices to see what types of things customers struggle with. There is budget for this project, but no one seems to know how to record mobile device interactions properly.

As the UX member of the team it is up to you to create a mobile usability set up in the current usability lab. You have never done this before so you go to the internet to find more information and create the best set up you can that will impress your bosses and provide great results.