Versions Compared

Old Version 11

changes.mady.by.user Unknown User (majapw@mit.edu)

Saved on

compared with

New Version 12

changes.mady.by.user Unknown User (majapw@mit.edu)

Saved on

Key

  • This line was added.
  • This line was removed.
  • Formatting was changed.

...

Briefing:

Imagine you are analyst at Boingo looking to make additions to your WiFi towers in South Africa.  You want to look at population and rainfall data in that region to find optimum places to add towers.  Already loaded into your interface, you have 3 already existing data sets, and one dataset of new additions.
Useful background information:
Satellites (going up in 2013-2014) will provide WiFi coverage over Africa, but their frequency range can't transmit signals through rain.  WiFi towers do work in rain.  Many African tribes are nomadic, moving around in search of water and food.  Your job is to find locations for new towers to maximize the number of people with WiFi access, taking into account the data.

Demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfDULO83dpU

Tasks:

Task 1: View the relationships between two of these sets on the map.
Task 2: Find three regions without WiFi coverage, and add new towers there.
Task 3: Analyze their costs and move the most expensive towers to places with the highest population and highest rainfall.

User 1:

Task 1: On task 1, the user did successfully locate the areas of the maps the had both high population and high rainfall.  However, it seemed to take him many, many clicks and turning on and off of both layers to determine this fact.  What's more, he never clicked the arrow buttons to the right of the datasets that would have allowed him more control over what he was viewing.  After he had tried all of the tasks, the experimenter brought this up and asked him what he though that arrows would lead to.  He correctly thought that perhaps it would be some sort of context menu, and once he used it, he thought it was very helpful.

Task 2: Adding new wifi towers was not a problem.  The change in cursor after clicking the "Add Towers" button seemed to make him aware of what he needed to do pretty readily.  He dragged around the towers with no problem, although resizing them was not intuitive, and he didn't really know what to make of the sliders in the pop-up window. 

Task 3: The user was able to complete the task, although again, he had to repeatedly toggle the data layers (population and rainfall) on and off in order to decide where the ideal location was to place the towers.  This was made slightly easier when the ability to filter out the layers was demonstrated to him.

Feedback: 

  • The colors were a bit confusing.  They seems to blend together somewhat and it was hard to tell what was what.
  • The legend was originally not too visible.  It might be better if it were a part of the sidebar.
  • The menu location and general feel of the whole project was good because it reminded him of the standard Google Maps interface (sidebar and all) and that was familiar and easy to use as a result.

Reflection:

...