Evaluating newly launched Ads Preferences

Context:

In January 2017, Transparency and Control team wanted to reviewed the usability of the December 2016 release of the new merged ads settings and preferences. Prior to the release, Ad Settings and Preferences were two separate components and after some research, the team had decided to merge the two into one for a better user experience. With a total of n=32 remote usability test participants from US, UK, DE, and BR. The site had good usability.

My role:

I lead research on the Ads Transparency and Control team at Facebook. I led a usability study with a total of n=32 remote test participants from US, UK, Germany, and Britain, half saw the desktop interface and the other saw the mobile interface. They used their own devices and logged into their own Facebook accounts. The study was conducted in English but used their usual language setting; however the merged ad preferences page was in English only.

The participants captured both their screen and audio with UserTesting.com as they did a think aloud usability study.

After the study, findings were collated in a table format to look for patterns. Overall, there were two critical issues that were highlighted to the team and a hitlist of issues document was created. This was shared with the team to triage the issues to the appropriate team member/s.

Findings:

• Nine medium priority issues were discovered, including general misunderstandings about Ad Settings and several visual design complaints.
• Six low priority issues were discovered; including small usability fixes and some strangely written content strategy.