Habbo usability test

Inka Vikman, Concept Designer at Sulake Corporation Oy :

We were comprehensively renewing the usability and technology of Habbo when we switched from Shockwave technology to Flash technology. The objective was that the new product would better serve users' needs with its ease of use and would remove the threshold of trying out the service since the users would not have to download a separate Shockwave plug-in to the browser.

We wanted to collect feedback about the usability of the product and the service with usability tests before Beta phase when the service was launched for a limited group of users.

The goal was to test against the production environment so that the impact of the communality would be a part of the user experience and would correspond to a real social situation of using the service. We wanted to reach such level of usability for our product that it would be easy for the users to switch to the new service after using the old one.

We wanted to have the users trying out the product in real context to find out how well the renewed service works and which issues still need improving. Etnoteam got familiarized with the product in development and based on discussions with us planned the usability test tasks and recruited suitable users for the tests. The tests were partly run as pair tests which worked very well as a testing method since the users were able to discuss issues and problems regarding the tasks together. Tests were conducted in Etnoteam's usability laboratory in Helsinki.

The product development team was observing the tests. This way the team was able to get firsthand knowledge about the needed improvement areas. The developers could also observe issues that were not directly related to usability.

The initial feedback and findings of the usability problems were delivered to the whole development team at the end of each test day which allowed us to make immediate improvements. We were able to implement some of the improvements to the product before the next test sessions. In this way the effects of these improvements were seen in the next tests.

Etnoteam went through the final report with the product development team presenting the prioritized findings and video clips. The discovered issues were discussed with the team.

The findings presented by Etnoteam consultants also brought us new perspectives to how the user experience of the product can be enhanced in the future. Added to this, several usability and user experience issues were found and Etnoteam provided us with a separate bug report as well. The interviews gave us more information about the users' motives and we learned more about what they appreciate in our service and what they pay attention to.

Based on observations, reports, videos and the final report we were quickly able to make improvements and finalizations to the usability and user experience before opening the service for the Beta group.

The product team was able to see how the product is used and what kind of usability related problems the users face. This, for its part, gave the team new motivation and increased its understanding of the users.

The launching of the new service went great during the summer of 2009. It was first launched to a limited target group invited to try it out. This group of users was then allowed to invite more test users and finally all users were let to use the new service. The old service was kept alongside with the new one as long as almost all users had voluntarily started to use the new service and all the functions essential for the users had been transferred to it.

Etnoteam's competent and enthusiastic project team helped us notice the essential deficiencies on user's point of view and instead of just pure usability test we got a lot of valuable information on users' preferences and motives which will help us develop the service to an even more user friendly direction in the future.