Evaluation of the navigation app Waze

Assessing the UX of Waze against design principles and developing recommendations to improve the UX and safety of the driver.

Role:

Duration:

Tools:

Team:

UX Research

2 weeks

Google Scholar

Other Human Factors students

Context

Waze is one of the navigation apps with competitors like Google Maps, In-Dash, and TomTom. As part of a university project, we performed a heuristic evaluation of the app against 8 design principles by Johnson (2014). Based on the evaluation, we gave recommendations for a redesign of Waze. The project included the analysis of more tasks, but to make this case study easier to read, the analysis of only one task is included.


Process

Challenge

Domain & Content Analysis

Waze is one of the navigation apps with competitors like Google Maps, In-Dash, and TomTom. The main functions are

  • Determine the shortest and fastest route between two points

  • Provide real-time information about traffic congestions

  • Adjust the route accordingly

It includes an additional social navigation function. Here, users can share and mark radar traps and fuel prices. Sharing information with other users is rewarded within the app. The primary users of Waze are vehicle drivers navigating an unknown area, possibly while receiving real-time knowledge about traffic conditions to adjust their route.

Defining Requirements

Evaluation against Design Principles

We used the requirement analysis based on Maguire (2001) to analyse the context of use and come up with the requirements. He defined 13 different contexts which are divided by the categories of:

  • User type (e.g. private driver)

  • Experience and knowledge (e.g. Task knowledge or experience with similar products)

  • Personal attributes (e.g. Age, Physical capabilities/limitations)

For each context, we assessed if it affects usability in the case of Waze. For example, gender does not affect usability in this case, whereas physical capabilities do. Based on this, we defined requirements.

Example regarding the context of task knowledge

Many users may be experienced with defining destination points and recognising the search bar. However, some users may have never used a similar product or are not familiar with the social navigation system.

Question: Does it affect usability in our case? → Yes

The resulting requirements are

  • Make the product consistent with standards of search engines

  • Provide the user with tutorials


Recommendation

Recommendation 1: Improve the search for an address when entering the destination.

Currently, the user is required to search through an unstructured list of all proposed addresses. To reduce the cognitive overload and improve the function:

  • Decrease the number of proposed search results and rank them according to distance so that the results are more easily scannable

  • Include an option to also search for city and country (not only street name) to decrease the number of search results

Recommendation 2: Make the background colour consistent across screens.

Currently, the background colours change when the user navigates from the initial search results to “More results for: Street x”. The inconsistency is confusing as the user might expect the newly displayed search results to be different from previous search results. To improve this:

  • Display the list of possible destination addresses consistently with the same background colour and the same size fo fields

Additional recommendations

  • Relocate the search button from the bottom left corner to the centre of the screen

  • Change the colour of the search symbol to red or let it shake for a short period of time

  • Insert a signal that indicates that the system is loading. For example: “System is trying to connect to GPS”. Support this by showing a progress bar that reaches 100% when the GPS is connected

  • Increase the size of the search bar

For this, we chose the task “Define the destination point for navigation”. As safety of the driver is one of our main concerns, we focused on 8 principles by Johnson (2014) which are related to perception and memory. If the driver has to pay too much attention to the app interface, their working memory becomes overloaded. Then, their attention becomes diverted from the road which can easily result in crashes. 

The task “Define the destination point for navigation” consisted of 4 steps. We evaluated each step with the 8 design principles. We also identified potential issues in each step and ranked the severity from 0 (No problem) to 4 (Usability Catastrophe). Each group member did the evaluation on their own but we discussed them together as a group later. We discussed the severity of the issues, ranked them, and then formulated recommendations.