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Rob Miller is a returning user to Housebill.com. He has just signed onto the site with his username, "user123"
Analysis 4
Learnability
Visibility
Efficiency
Error Prevention
Design 3
Storyboard 3
Rob Miller is a first time user to Housebill.com, and is looking for a way to organize his bills between himself and all of his suitemates. He looks at the main page of the site, and reads the static descriptions there. Intrigued, he clicks the "Join Us" button, which directs him to a form to make his account.
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Rob then clicks on the "test Household" link itself, which gives him a breakdown of what him and friendUser each owe, and offers him the ability to pay his bill with a "pay" button. Rob is not ready to pay his bill yet, so he decides that he has made enough progress for one day and signs out of his session.
A month later Rob decides to log back in and check on the household. Now that he has paid some bills the chart is filled in with where his money went and there are more news items. There are also more items on the calendar. Nothing is due too soon so he logs out again satisfied.
Analysis 3
Learnability
Learnability of the site for the initial tasks is good. The website uses large buttons to transition the user to the different states of creating an account, creating or linking to an initial household, and adding or paying a bill. Learnability for some of the less frequently used tasks like deleting a household or bill may be more difficult since there is no information scent on the main user interface to direct users to where these additional features can be found.
Visibility
Visibility on this site is very much like learnability. There is little information scent to direct users to the less frequently used features of the site making their visibility poor. This is a trade off for good visibility of the states the user would normally find himself in where the information is very good linking him from one view to another. Also, the user receives instant feedback on every action they commit, also helping visibility.
Efficiency
An advantage of this design is the efficiency of having most states that the user would want to see available from the original user view. The direct manipulation of bill creation helps error prevention by only allowing "approved" information to be entered into the bill form; however, users trying to create bills quickly will find the direct manipulation will slow down progress by making users need to click more objects instead of being able to navigate through the form by tabs.
Error Prevention
The confirmation screen after creating a bill helps prevent error prevention by making users confirm the bill information twice. There appears to be nowhere to edit bills once the bill is created, which will allow errors to propagate if they are created. The detachment of having the delete bills and household from the main interface will prevent accidental deletions helping error prevention.
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Once back at his User Page, Rob clicks the tab to go into Calendar View, which shows him all of his bills laid out by date. He sees that his next bill is not due for a while, and decides that he is ready to log out of Housebill.
Analysis 4
Learnability
A frequent user will be used to navigating only the left column of the site, which is where all of the login fields are located. Buttons that allow users to perform actions on a bill (edit, pay, etc.) are clearly labeled and placed next to the listing for that bill. Links to other main pages on the site are displayed prominently in the taskbar at the top of the user page. This lets users access the bills, user, and calendar views. A new user will be able to understand the overall structure, although some functions need to be better grouped. For instance, the Household display in the lower left hand column could use some "change" or "add new" buttons so that the user does not need to search for the Household View in the main User Page to make these types of edits.
Visibility
Information about users and frequently accessed households is visible in the left sidebar. The other pages the user can view (user details, calendar, etc.) are listed in the taskbar at the top of the page. On the pages that list bills and show how much money the user owes, lines of data can be expanded to show further details, but by default they are collapsed to maintain visual simplicity. Clickable links are underlined; the user's current page is highlighted in the taskbar. Any information that needs to be entered has an associated text field, which provides the appropriate affordances. However, some of the pages contain too much information, which could be a hindrance to the user. The User Page faces this issue.
Efficiency
There is a bit of redundancy, which users may find confusing. For example, the User column on the left displays information that is simultaneously displayed on the middle of the User Page. This real estate may be used for other means so that the information in not doubly presented. Users can find a bill from the user page, the bill listing page, or the calendar. This makes is easier for the user to find a piece of information, but the information scent used to get to it may need more fine-tuning. Overall, the ability to navigate to a page from multiple locations will help efficiency by forcing the user not to navigate through a longer route and will help learnability by not forcing the user to memorize one distinct path.
Error Prevention
This implementation is not great at dealing with error prevention. This design does not allow the user to undo transactions, although before a transaction goes through the user must review a confirmation page. In addition, information tends to be clustered together, so mis-clicks could be an issue. To deal with this, it would be a good idea to place less information on a screen.