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Briefing
Tasks
Observations
User 3:
Task 1: Immediately got attracted to the home news page. He scrolled down to the bottom of the page, and selected Problem Set 1. He didn’t see the place to post grades. After couple seconds, clicked on Grading. Used Ctrl+F to search for Chad. Forgot to switch to Problem Set 1, but since the maximum grade was less than the point to enter, he soon found out, and switched to Problem Set 1. He used tabs to switch between blanks. He asked about whether there is a submit/save grade button. The facilitator explained that the system does auto-save.
Task 2: Before Task 2, he tried on his own to type in the textbox, and found the system does filter. Task 2 went very smoothly. He searched the names in the box, and used tabs to switch between blanks.
Task 3: He first clicked the dropdown menu for switching problem sets on the grading page, then searched under Grading dropdown menu. Quickly he clicked on Homework, and clicked on “+ Homework”. The rest of the task went smoothly except he got confused about Name and Filename, but soon he corrected that.
Reflection
Because we already had a functioning product, we thought that we could focus more on coding the front-end features that we wanted to perfect through this course. Unfortunately, we didn’t take into our risk consideration the fact that our back-end would have to change, which turned out to be a bad decision. Our back-end had to change considerably to accommodate the features that arose from the user interface design process, which took a lot of our time away.
We decided at the very beginning to focus on a few core features: assignment creation, grading, and submitting. We wanted to focus our attention on this small set of very important features to perfect the user interaction with them. Having said that, we feel happy with the way the features turned out, and plan to work on the UIs of the other features, as this website will be in use next semester in 6.006.
The feedback from the paper prototype, from HW2, and from Anh has helped us tremendously, although there is a lot of overlap among the different feedback. This overlap helped us decide which problems to tackle first, because multiple people complaining about the same thing means that it’s a problem that is noticeable.
We evaluated the results through this GR6 and through our own interactions with the final product. We learned that we still need to tweak a few small things from the user studies we conducted for GR6, like, for example, allowing the TA to enter grades from the “Teacher” menu as well as the “Grading” menu. We feel that the product is leaps and bounds ahead of our initial prototype, and that it is ready to be used in production with an MIT algorithms class. The class will provide a lot more feedback for the next iteration of the project.