Our client was Mike Ma, who is the owner of Judy's Book. His main goal is to accumulate more high fidelity reviews written by people in their mid 20's to late 30's. He wants to encourage such users to share reviews in the most painless and easiest way possible.
Out of this, our groups goal for the usability studies was to discover any hindrance that deterred users from a transitioning from a review-reading role to a more active, review-writing role. More specifically, we studied the new-member signup process and the review writing process.

With our test kit complete and our participants recruited, we went about performing the usability studies. Approximately half of them where in the user's own house, with the other half being at office locations. During the studies, we recorded both their screen and their facial expressions and took note of all reactions and comments they made. We took careful note of what they clicked, where they paused, the concerns they voiced and all results of them using the website.

When we had completed all studies, we collected the data together to find patterns in the obstacles participants encountered. Luckily for us — though bad news for Judy's Book — there were several strong patterns that enabled us to recommend for their consideration various areas that need redesign.

(All data shown here is anonymized)