The Costco app is an e-commerce app for
membership-only retail warehouse Costco Wholesale.
The flow that I evaluated was the shopping feature.
Here are the 10 heuristics I followed to evaluate the
usability of the app.
To do an in-depth analysis of the user experience, I first mapped out the user flow of the app's shopping feature.
After assessing the flow using the 10 heuristics,
here are the areas with room for improvement.
The app provides consistent notifications and status updates to let the user know where they’re at.
When selecting a delivery option, the app has “Ground” selected by default, which can be confusing, as this means little to the user.
No easy way to navigate around the app, and no back button to easily return to the previous screen.
Buttons and text links are inconsistent across the app and some text on the banners are illegible.
Not much has been done to prevent the user from getting errors. The minus sign on the quantity stepper is still clickable even at “1”.
Search history stays even if user is not signed in and closes the app.
The user has to go through multiple screens from the home page to adding an item.
Information on screen can be overwhleming and confusing the for the user. Not super clear on which elements are grouped together.
The app provides an error message when the user enters the wrong information but doesn’t offer a solution.
There is too much noise on the Delivery Details screen and makes it hard for the user to read.
I then prioritized the suggested improvements based on severity before I started redesigning.
With a clearer vision of the redesign, I then created wireframes in Figma of what it could look like.
Use indicators instead of arrows
Simplified the screen
Added navigation throughout
Reduce amount of screens to get to the
product viewing
Use similar item cards as on home screen
User can quickly back out
Greyed out the minus button on the stepper
Changed the wording
Tackling a redesign project was exciting to me, and the moment I started on this project there were so many areas that I wanted to tackle, but didn’t have the time for. Here were my challenges:
I learned to appreciate the evaluation process from this study and it helped give me insight on how to curate a better user experience from an existing product or service.