Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Miklos Philips

The latest iPad App from Bloomberg Businessweek magazine digital edition was released in July 2017. I’m a subscriber and find the content generally decent, but the App itself really frustrating to use.

There are only 9 reviews on the iTunes App Store—eight of them 1 star, one is 2 stars. In short: #uxfail.

It’s always good to learn from others’ mistakes, so I decided to switch on my “U-X-ray” eyes and run a heuristic evaluation. (If you want to take a deep dive, here’s a detailed article on heuristic analysis I wrote recently: “Elevate Your UX with Heuristic Analysis — How to Run a Usability Evaluation”)

I used two sets of heuristics to analyze against: Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design (probably the most commonly used set of usability heuristics), and the 20 Usability Heuristics by Susan Weinschenk and Dean Barker shown below.

Susan Weinschenk and Dean Barker (Weinschenk and Barker 2000) researched usability guidelines and heuristics from many sources (including Nielsen’s, Apple, and Microsoft) and generated this set of 20 Usability Heuristics to check against.

Let’s Tear this Sucker Down!

Downloading an issue for offline reading from the “Issues” pageThe article browsing screenWhich article was I reading?

I can’t help but think the design team missed a huge opportunity when designing this new App’s UX. Is it failing to “GOOB” (Get Out Of the Building)? What stands out for me is that they didn’t do enough testing with actual users in day-to-day “real-world” use case scenarios.

In my humble opinion, if they had run a heuristic analysis most of these usability problems would have become apparent.

Follow me on Twitter for UX tidbits.

Bloomberg Businessweek iPad App Heuristic Teardown was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bloomberg Businessweek iPad App Heuristic Teardown

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles