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Our testing revealed several improvements to be made to each design iteration.
First Prototype
In the third task, our first user had a few difficulties. While she was able to find the note from the previous user of her washing machine, the affordance for replying to the note was not very clear to her. The display of "Message User" was in a box that was not implying three dimensions, so she thought that it was just instructions and she "closed" our popover, and chose "Leave your own note" to reply to the user's message! We had to make the function of contacting a previous user more intuitive and immediately learnable.
All of our initial user testers asked about our use of the word "Idle" to describe some laundry machines. We had meant for this term to indicate that a machine had finished running but was still full of clothing; such a machine could be used if the user was willing to move the previous user's laundry. Some users understood this idea with thought, and others needed an explanation, but when we asked for comments this was the most frequently indicated problem. We had to pick a clearer term for this concept. Another thought that came up when we were testing this aspect was the idea that the clothes that had been waiting longer should be moved out first, and we decided to include this concept in our next design.
Second Prototype
After our second round of prototyping, we discovered that our prototype did not handle some additional functions that would be simple to add. For example, if a person leaves a note, it is easy to contact them, but we did not handle the case where a user chooses not to leave a note but still should be contactable. We can fix this by adding "Message previous user" to the machine information panel (second picture under task 1) when there is no note that would be "from previous user".
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