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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
User Population
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.
Procedure
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.
Results
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:
- Cosmetic - Some users did not see the popup displaying a landmark's name, but they knew what it was due to their familiarity with MIT .
- This may be solved if users were not familiar with MIT, because when users searched for the name of the landmark they were able to find it.
- Minor - All three users attempted to click on a landmark and suggested that clicking on a landmark when following a tour would pop up more information about it.
- We planned to add Yelp integration in our app, but found it outside the scope of our interface design.
- Cosmetic - Two of three users wanted information to automatically pop up when you approached a landmark.
- Right now, the landmark is being highlighted as you approach it, so an info popup would be an easy extension.
- Minor - Two of three users could not determine how to re-order landmarks when creating a tour. All three of them first attempted to do it by dragging the landmark from its center, instead of on the left (where the draggable affordance existed). Two ways of solving this problem would be to make the entire landmark draggable, or to make the draggable affordance more obvious. One One user did see the dots and assumed that meant it was draggable ("otherwise why would there be dots?").
- We could make the entire landmark draggable.
- We could make the draggable affordances more obvious.
- Major - When searching for landmarks, half of the screen was taken up by the keyboard and the other half was divided into half map and half list. Both of the two users who attempted to search by name found this interface to be much too small to interact with.
- When the keyboard is open, we should
- hide the list view so that a larger map view is visible.
- Minor - When you search for a landmark that is already on-screen, it is not obvious that anything happens when the map relocates slightly.
- A popup that says "Found x results" or similar could be useful.
- Cosmetic - One user was overwhelmed with the initial map view, because there were many landmarks.
- This could be solved by clustering landmarks together until the user zoomed in to an appropriate zoom level.
Reflections
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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