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Observations
User 1 (Wednesday)
(prototype A)
Our first user was confused about the whole storyline and only completed the first task. We probably didn't do very good job explaining the domain.
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If we have several drop-down menues menus with dependencies (i.e. you set the first one and the options in the second change) there needs to be something to
User 2 (Wednesday)
(prototype B)
User 3 (Friday)
(modified prototype B)
We felt this user was closest to potential users of the application because she understood the semantics of the scenario. The first thing that we learned from observing her was that she tried to make a plot from a channel info page. It was intuitive to expect that one can make a plot from the channel's info screen, but we didn't have it in our prototype - we plan to include it in our further iterations.
Also when making the plot, she was confused to what is the outcome of pressing OK vs Cancel. We didn't have very intuitive answer - the new plot should appear somehow in the main screen. This is another aspect of the interface we need to polish.
Another comment from the user is that it would have been useful if there was a generic "Publish" ability instead of going in a channel first. We think this is a reasonable suggestion and we'll work towards adding this functionality.
The modification to the the prototype was that we substituted the publishing interface with the publishing interface from prototype A. Our user was able to understand it but we also asked her about whether she thinks text field could be better, and through discussion we reached the conclusion that maybe the best combination would be to have a text field with some kind of push-scrolling capability (like a toy-car remote control button)
User 4 (Friday)
(prototype A)
We decided to test again prototype A with another user and we learned a lot about its deficiencies.
The first thing that we learned was that the layout screen on paper lacked the affordances we wanted to hint.
Also, we realized that the multi-channel presentation wasn't intuitive to the user. She could start changing a certain component of a channel, and when she changed the channel the other two drop-down menus were changed. There were dependencies between the drop-down menus which were not highlighted properly in the interface. Also, the single-plot in the bottom didn't give information about the other channels - this was a clear visibility problem.
Prototype iteration
We actually started with two prototypes. We took the two most diverse designs from GR2 and each of team created a prototype around each design. Each team member implemented a prototype (A and B), the design for which was proposed by the other team member - this way we better understood each other's ideas and we able to avoid emotional attachment to specific features in the desingsthe designs. After the tests on Wednesday we decided to swap certain parts between prototype A and B to compare the differences.
Our iteration cosists next prototype will consist of merging the ideas that we found work in each prototype after the in-class testing.
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