GR6 - User Testing
Design
- Describe the final design of your interface. Illustrate with screenshots. Point out important design decisions and discuss the design alternatives that you considered. Particularly, discuss design decisions that were motivated by the three evaluations you did (paper prototyping, heuristic evaluation, and user testing).
BucketList allows users to easily create Buckets, share their Buckets with others, add tasks, write notes, and view and organize all this information on their boardat once. The final design is centered around the bulletin board metaphor, giving the UI a clear and unique focus. The Our design also prioritizes efficiency and simplicity, as this is what most users requested during initial surveys and user analysis (see GR1 for more detail on user analysis).
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Login / Create an Account
Figure 1: Login
The first thing the user sees when opening BucketList is a plain bulletin board with a large piece of paper asking them to log in or create an account. We always planned on having the initial landing page be simple, and there were no problems with it during testing, so this part did not change very much based on user feedback.
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In our initial paper prototypes, there was a much smaller less of a focus on the bulletin board. In addition, each Bucket had a different board ( instead of having one main board with all the user's info). We got lots of feedback regarding information. A lot of the feedback we got on our paper prototype centered around the bulletin board (see GR3 for details), and the consensus seemed to be that users liked the bulletin board but didn't like how we were implementing it. We tried two different designs of the bulletin board (splitting the screen with an "all notes" and the bulletin board, and having tabs to go between "all notes" and the board) for the paper prototype, and took all the comments into account when designing the website for GR4. Based on feedback we decided to switch to the 'one main board' approach and we split the screen into 3 sections (side list of buckets, bulletin board on top, and list of notes / tasks on the bottom). After coding this, we did another round of user testing before GR4 was due. Many users commented that they wanted more room for the bulletin board and thought that always displaying the notes / tasks in the bottom and list of buckets on the side was a waste of space. Based on this feedback, we redesigned to look more like the website in the screenshot above.
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- Describe how you conducted your user test.
- Describe how you found your users and how representative they are of your target user population (but don't identify your users by name).
- Describe how the users were briefed
- and what tasks they performed;
- if you did a demo for them as part of your briefing, justify that decision.
- List the usability problems you found, and discuss how you might solve them.
User tests on the final BucketList website were conducted with 5 different users, from varying demographics.
Representative Users
We made sure that each of the users who participated in final user testing use to-do lists on a regular basis and have a need to keep track of group projects, thus they all fit perfectly into our target user population. Since BucketList targets such a wide range of users, we also made sure our test subjects came from varying demographics with respect to age, location, gender, education, and technological expertise, so as not to limit ourselves to other MIT students who think too similarly to us. Many users in our evaluation were MIT student (by far the easiest to find), but we also included professionals and high-school students (found by speaking with friends and family), who we believe would benefit from BucketList.
Briefing
The following short briefing was given to each test subject before we began the evaluation:
"BucketList is a shared task-management application, allowing users to easily create group to-do lists.
Once you have an account, you can create "Buckets" - categories to put your tasks in. You can then add tasks to your existing buckets. This application is different than most task-management applications you've probably used in the past, because you can also share buckets with your friends. So, for example, you might create a "Final Group Assignment" bucket, which you will share with the rest of your group. You can then assign each person in the group individual tasks, like "do research" or "outline presentation", and monitor your progress, as a group, towards completing the project. You can also write and share notes about each task, to make sure you're all on the same page, and you can even send alerts to make sure your friends don't miss important notes.
We are going to describe a scenario for you, and ask you to use BucketList to help you accomplish your goals. This shouldn't take more than 10-15 minutes. Do you have any questions before we start?"
Tasks
Please imagine that you are a junior in college, taking 4 classes, and editor of the student newspaper. You already have an account with a 'Newspaper' Bucket, shared with all other students on the newspaper staff.
- You were just assigned a final project in your Computer Systems class. You need to write
- Your teacher reminds you
- blah blah
student in 6.813, and your group decided to switch the focus of your project, so you have to redo GR1. You were also just assigned GR2. And in your busy schedule, you somehow also just got a UROP.
Task 1 - Add note to GR1, reminding your group to update the wiki.
Task 2 - Remove Bayo's note from the bulletin, then place your new note in the center.
Task 3 - You've completed GR1! Now add a task called GR2 to your 6.813 bucket, and add the appropriate collaborators.
Task 4 - Add a UROP bucket.
on 6 MIT students who keep to-do lists and must manage group projects (exactly our target audience), who we found by asking our friends. We began by asking some questions about how they currently do to manage to-do lists, and got answers ranging from "I write everything on my mirror or on scraps of paper" to "I use MGSD for group task-management, and then I import everything to Google tasks for due-dates and reminders". This ensured that some test subjects were familiar with shared task-management applications, while others just keep their own to-do lists, so that we got a wide range of responses.
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