GR6 - User Testing
Design
One of the most important design considerations that we changed from our paper prototype to our final design was to allow the user to create events from the homepage, in addition to search for them. We recognized that the important distinction between our two main classes of users, party-goers and party promoters, was their primary tasks were searching and creating parties respectively. The original design only had a search bar on the main page, which only allowed partygoers to look for their event. If the search came up empty, there would be a link to create an event. This is not ideal for the party promoter because the interface is not easily learnable nor is it accessible. Therefore, we created two toggle buttons on the homepage to allow both user classes to easily access their primary tasks from the homepage.
One of our user tests pointed out that they didn’t know what they could type in the search bar to effectively find parties. We realized this was a problem with usability and that it might cause errors if the user tries to find their event by date and cannot find it. Therefore, we came up with two solutions: to either create tooltips that would appear when the user clicks on the search bar or to display a watermark tip in the existing search bar that would disappear when the user clicked to focus on the search bar. We chose the later of the two choices because it would be more visible to the user since it appears by default and also because it was consistent with other search engines like Grooveshark, Pandora, and Last.fm that all use watermark tips.
Lastly, we made some cosmetic changes to the splash image to reduce its look as a button. Some users tried to click on the splash image, for no reason but that they wanted more interaction. Because each image has a border around it, it gives it the slight affordance that makes it look like a button. Thus, we removed this border to make them look more like pure images.
Implementation
...