Approachability of KeePassXC: Can Anyone Use It?
To compliment the in-depth testing our friends at Accessibility Lab provide, we wanted to understand the approachability KeePassXC. In addition, we wanted to measure how easy or difficult it was for people to set it up. We tested with a variety of users ranging in age and tech savviness.
We learned a lot about how people perceive KeePassXC—its use and its value. We also found that each participant had a different idea about when the setup process was complete. Regardless of where people stopped, the majority of participants didn’t know what to do next after they finished ‘setup’. This, along with many other insights, helped our team and KeePassXC identify areas for improvement. Read all about the learnings in our report: User Insights for KeePassXC.
The Process: Assessing Approachability
The set of images to the left walk through the self-driven study. Each participant was briefed about how to move through the study. Then guided by this stack of cards.
We had 2 overarching questions in this study:
How well do people understand KeePassXC?
What barriers exist in the setup process?
We designed this study to be self-driven so that it could be easily replicated. We also tried an approach that let users decide the steps to get setup, rather than giving them a set of prescribed tasks to complete. We wanted to leave it as open as possible so we could understand how people would likely use it in their everyday life.
Lessons Learned: Things We Would Do Differently Next Time
After each participant finished, we took 15 minutes to debrief individually. We would likely do a group debrief rather than individual. This structure would make more efficient use of everyone’s time. It also opens up an opportunity for conversation and discussion between participants. With help from our friends at Internews, we’ve found some nice strategies to make room for everyone’s voices to be heard in a group conversation.
We made a number of changes to the cards that guided participants through the study. They are reflected in First Use Activity of the Exploratorium. The First Use activity is a generalized version of the second component of this study that seeks to answer: What barriers exist in the setup process? It’s designed for any team to take and use to learn about their own app or product. The biggest change was to define what the end of the setup process is. In the case of KeePassXC, rather than asking participants to set it up, we would give them a mission to fulfill. That mission would be to use KeePassXC to login to Twitter or Facebook. Walking through that full process would shed light on the ease of use and/or full scope of barriers to use.
Things We Would Not Change
Feeding participants tacos 🌮
The self-driven approach