...
We make liberal use of AJAX, because our Rails application will be deployed on a 4-core server where each core can respond to most requests in less than 10ms, so overloading the server is not an issue. This will need to be revisited if the site grows to Stellar’s size.
Evaluation
Users
Briefing
We are working on a course management site, something along the lines of Stellar. Students submit psets, TAs get them, grade them, enter the grades, and then students see their grades. Today, we want to test the UI for entering grades. You are a TA, and your tasks will all revolve around posting psets and entering grades for psets.
Tasks
- Log in as a TA with
username: costan@mit.edu
password: mit
- Task 1: Change the grade for one student, Chad Medrano, for Problem Set 1
Chad got the following grades:- Problem 1: 8
- Problem 2: 4
- Problem 3: 5
- Task 2: You have many students (30+) whose grades for Problem Set 6 you need to enter into the system. Please note that ordinarily, when faced with this quantity of grades, the user would naturally discover that he or she can use the keyboard to increase efficiency. We can make this assumption since we have data confirmation of this behavior based on the system prior to the UI improvements that we're working on now.
- The header labels are: Name, Problem 1, Problem 2, Problem 3, Problem 4, Problem 5, Problem 6, Problem 7, Problem 8
- Samuel Miner: 7, 8, 6, 3, 11, 6, 6, 6
- Amelia Ireland: 5, 8, 9, 10, 0, 5, 7, 8
- Task 3: Post a new problem set - Problem Set 9.
- It is due on May 12th at 23:59.
- A pdf write-up named User Testing is required. The filename should be testing.pdf
- It is worth 10 pts with weight 1.0.
Observations
- User 1:
- 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.
...