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Usability Problems We Found and Possible Solutions:

Minor (consistency and standards):  We had taken out our original date-input interface and replaced it with a much more efficient design that allows users to input date and time into the same box.  However, less technical users seemed confused by the fact that they were inputting both date and time at the same time. One solution is to go back to the old design we had in our Paper Prototype that is more consistent with other interfaces that these users uses.

Cosmetic (visibility of system status):  Another usability issue is also on the “Create New Timer” screen.  The “Create” button always looks the same, regardless of whether it is enabled or disabled.  We didn’t think this would be an issue, since the forms themselves each provide their own form of feedback. However, one user did not notice the field-specific feedback after he had entered invalid input until after he had hit the “Create” button multiple times to no effect.  Two possible solutions are making the field-specific feedback more noticeable and giving the “Create” button a less-clickable looking appearance when its functionality is disabled.

Reflections

Probably the single biggest thing we learned was the benefits of using an iterative design process and developing inexpensive prototypes before investing resources on code and then on a backend.  Our original design had a lot of aspects-for instance, a confusing sidebar dedicated solely to "Pending" timers-that we realized could be improved significantly during the paper prototyping session.  Had we not done prototyping first, we would have only realized this after spending a lot of time coding the sidebar.

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