Knack App Analysis
Researching the Knack App user experience
Introduction
The Michigan State University Career Center wanted student input on whether to use Knack, an app meant to assess an individual's strengths and aptitudes. The idea was to use this app for students entering their early years of college in the hopes that it would help students make good decisions on which major to choose.
The app works by having the user play three games meant to assess different skills. After the user plays a game, the data is analyzed and the user’s “knacks” are then displayed in the Knack app for the user to review.
Research
Each member of my team first individually played and tested the app ourselves. Once we played through the app, we debriefed together on what we felt were the main strengths and weaknesses of the app experience. Each idea was written on a different Post-It note, and we then clustered the data together to form initial hypotheses. These included:
- Was the app experience intuitive?
- Did it provide an accurate assessment of the individuals' strengths and aptitudes?
- Would a student be able to use the app to choose a career path?
We then recruited a diverse array of students to come in and do user testing. Six students from different backgrounds, majors and years came to the Hub for a testing session. A team member sat alongside them taking handwritten notes as the user talked through their experience completing the app assessment. After the assessment was completed, each user debriefed with the team member about their experience.
Synthesis
At our next meeting, the team reviewed the initial questions we had drawn up, as well as the main advantages and disadvantages of the app. Each team member wrote their points on individual post-it notes, and we used the size of each Post-It note cluster to rank our advantages and disadvantages.
After our final discussion, we used the information we collected to write a final report and assessment for the Career Center as well as an infographic instructing students on how to use the app.
Advantages
The final report showed each student a score ranking their strengths and weaknesses. One of the main advantages that students said they had with the app was the ability to see what their strengths and weaknesses were. For some students, this assessment matched closely with what they perceived their own strengths and weaknesses to be. Other students were surprised to see that they had skills in a certain area.
Playing the video games is more fun for the students than taking a test like the MBTI or OCEAN, in which you fill out a 70-question survey. There is also more opportunity to watch people actually display personality traits in action by playing the games rather than them telling you what they perceive themselves to be.
Disadvantages
The language translations are not accurate. Two of our testers spoke English as a second language, and opted to take the tests in their native languages (Chinese and Spanish). For both students, the in-game translations were mostly gibberish and appeared to be based on Google Translate. They suggested this could be offensive to some people.
You have to download each of the three games separately from the Knack app, and log in to each individually; this is a problem for people who might not have enough space on their phones, and was a major pain point for our users.
Instructions to each game can be ambiguous; some users had a hard time understanding what to do on each game, because there either wasn’t instructions or the instructions were not clear enough.
Knacks are difficult to find in the app, even though they have their own tab; when the user opens the Knack tab, the first thing they see is “Can’t see your Knacks?” which leads them to think something is wrong. It took most every tester too much time to figure out their Knacks were actually listed further down in that tab, and when they did find them, some people thought that the Knacks were actually more games.
There’s no justification for credibility; once people found their Knacks, there was no explanation as to why they got those Knacks which made them question the credibility and accuracy of the app.
Final Deliverables
We created an infographic to walk users through the use of the Knack app, and created a report to send to the Career Center on our analysis of the Knack app.
