Designing a User-Friendly Online Cannabis Marketplace

Project Overview

Our team conducted a series of usability evaluations of Leafly.com, including a heuristic evaluation, a cognitive walkthrough, a usability test, and a comparative usability test.

Goal

Identify usability issues and provide specific recommendations for correcting them and improving the user experience.

Role

One of three UX designers who collaboratively evaluated the usability of an existing website, conducted research and user testing, and provided design recommendations to improve the overall usability of the site.

Process

  1. Heuristic Evaluation: First, our team conducted individual heuristic evaluations of the Leafly website. Our intention was to uncover as many issues as possible among the team to combine our findings later. Following our individual heuristic evaluations, we combined our findings into a combined heuristic evaluation. As a team, we discussed our individual findings and developed a prioritized report.
  2. Cognitive Walkthrough: Each team member identified one core task for analysis and conducted a cognitive walkthrough.

    Core tasks evaluated:

    • Create a new user account on Leafly.com
    • Request an appointment with a doctor to obtain a medical card
    • Find a dispensary in a specific location on Leafly.com

    All steps of each task were evaluated using the following questions:

    1. Will the user try to achieve the right effect?
    2. Will the user notice that the correct action is available?
    3. Will the user associate the correct action with the effect to be achieved?
    4. Will the user see that progress is being made toward the solution?

    Successes and failures with supporting reasoning were recorded for each question. After completing our walkthroughs, we came together and evaluated each walkthrough as a group. Finally, we participated in several rounds of discussion and analysis to summarize our findings and recommendations.

  3. Usability Testing: Through our heuristic evaluations and cognitive walkthroughs, we determined that the usability issues uncovered may have a negative impact on the experience of users attempting to purchase products. Based on this finding, we focused our usability tests on assessing how easily and efficiently novice Leafly.com users could find and purchase products. Our goals were to identify any usability issues users may encounter while buying products on Leafly.com and provide associated recommendations for improvement. To fit within our time constraints, we focused our testing on the desktop version of Leafly’s website.
  4. Comparative Usability Test: Additionally, our team conducted a comparative usability test of Leafly.com and Weedmaps.com to identify users’ ability to successfully find dispensary hours of operation utilizing the dispensary map on each website. We collected data, including participants’ time on task and participants’ difficulty rating of the task. Our goal was to answer the following test objective through our collected data: Can participants quickly and easily find the hours of operation of a designated dispensary?

Findings

Based on the usability tests conducted, following is an abbreviated list of findings and recommendations to improve the usability of the Leafly website.

Finding one: Some participants did not notice the change location link at the top right of the global navigation due to its relatively small size and location. Participants expected to be able to change their location within the dispensary map.

Recommendation: Make the existing link to change location more prominent. Add the ability to change location within the dispensary map sidebar.

Screenshot showing small size and poor location of the change location link.

Finding two: Two out of four participants encountered an error while trying to change their location that prevented them from continuing to use the website and did not provide instructions regarding how to proceed.

Recommendation: The language in the error message is targeted towards developers, which is not helpful for a typical Leafly user, who may not understand what the error is. The error message should be rewritten so that it is understandable to the average user and assists users in how to proceed.

Screenshot showing ambiguous error message language.

Finding three: Participants expressed confusion and frustration when they searched for a dispensary by location and realized they had to scroll past sponsored results to find the results relevant to their search parameters.

Recommendation: Move sponsored dispensary listings to another location or differentiate them in a more obvious way from search results so that users recognize them as sponsored results more quickly.

Screenshot showing how sponsored dispensaries are currently displayed before search results.

Future Work

If I could conduct this project again, I would conduct the comparative usability test using live websites, rather than static prototypes. Doing this would provide more robust insights as users were only able to click areas that we enabled and could not freely navigate.

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