Out of Box Experience Usability Testing (OOBE)

My role

I was the lead researcher for the Out of Box Usability Testing for Sony Android TV. With the initiative from Global Usability testing and user research team, I led end-to-end research across Indian team with Indian users along with a designer in team.

I worked with a designer on global team, a product manager and software engineer in Tokyo, and a marketing team member in the US. The same usability test was conducted across the world in Germany, US, UK, China, and Japan. I led the UX Research team in India.

Goal

Goal is to –

• Understand users’ experience with the physical setup of Sony BraviaTV.
•  Identify pain points on setting up the TV including unboxing the carton, TV handling and any necessary assembly.

Method

OOBE: Out of Box Experience. Normally a documentation is included. E.g. quick setup guide (QSG) or access to online manual. These sessions were conducted one-on-one, where moderator watched one participant at a time.

This method of using Affinity mapping helped us- team members (UX Researcher, Product owner, Designer and Stakeholders) to quickly organise:

• Observations or ideas from research
• Concepts that surface in design-ideation sessions
• Ideas about UX strategy and vision

This method helped to take better decisions in terms of the number of insights found.

Participant Criteria

•  Participants are chosen who do not hire installer for their TV setup and who do their setup themselves excluding Engineers, Marketing, and advertising field members.

Tasks:

Participant must unbox the TV from the box and go through the entire process of physical as well as software installation.

Synthesis

Pre-test questionnaire has been prepared asking participants in detail about their experience of setting up their TV and how they do it in detail before selection. Since the entire test is covering software as well as hardware requirements, I had to follow a meticulous process of cross-checking questionnaire multiple times with stakeholder’s, performing a demo before the usability test and re-evaluating the time taken for the session.

Impact

There were lot of key insights which we have received from the usability test and some of those insights were –

•  Changes has been done for next version where additional pictures were included for optimal opening on carton.
•  Image of Introduction position and size was changed so that users will not miss it on the guide.
• QSG pops up out of carton.
•  Labels image was replaced by a better resolution image