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Users can add their own tours to the database, and in the future when they search those landmarks they will find their tour. This is not local to this user, so all users see all tours created. There is currently no way for a user to delete a tour, but this doesn't hurt functionality that much.
Evaluation
When we were initially formulating the idea for our app, we consulted with several of our friends to determine whether they thought our idea was any good. Several of them expressed that they would use the app themselves; therefore we followed-up with these users in order to perform our user study. We believe them to be good representative users since they are people that would be likely to search for, download, and use our application. However, they are all MIT students and there are likely other biases due to the fact that we knew them and they were not selected randomly. We decided that this was an acceptable trade-off for the ease of finding users, since we did believe them to be within our target population.
All of the users for the user study had not used our app previously. One of them was an Android user, so we provided him the application and instructed him to install it. The other two were not Android users, so we provided them with our Nexus One test device to use. We instructed all users to open the application. We then read them our briefing, unchanged from our paper prototype: "Torch is a mobile application designed to help users find and follow walking tours of notable landmarks and attractions. Users can also create and submit their own tours." We then sequentially gave them three tasks, also unchanged from our paper user study. We focused on these tasks throughout our entire design process, so it made sense to keep them the same.
- Find a tour of MIT's campus.
- Follow a tour around MIT's campus.
- Make a tour of MIT's dorms that includes Baker, East Campus, and Burton-Conner.
For the most part, reactions from our users were positive. Users were able to complete our tasks with very little assistance, which is strikingly different from our paper prototype user study.
Usability problems are summarized below, along with possible solutions:
Reflection
Designing a product is highly challenging and may be the most difficult task our group has ever faced together. We all had unique visions for our final product and merging those visions together with the other constraints of real life, such as time, was difficult and taught us all some valuable lessons.
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