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- User ignored panning and altitude controls. (visibility issue -- learnability)
- Navigate icon was mistaken for a button. (consistency issue -- learnability)
- When looking through tweets the user tried clicking on the text to view additional information rather than using the text input boxscroll.
- User ignored aggregation panels: map, articles.
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- Likes exploring the interface, testing different navigation controls.
- Had difficulty finding how to move from the image viewing mode to reading tweets mode. (learnability issue)
- Does not move directly to address the task but takes extra steps to explore the interface. For instance instead of directly viewing the location, goes to the tweets tab first. (efficiency issue)
Feedback
- Suggested it would be easier if mode change buttons were located within the main active window, not only from the bar above.
- No option to decline an invitation to view a comment. Interface becomes overcrowded with small windows.
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- Confuses navigate symbol for a button (bad internal consistency).
- Likes navigating, using different control buttons.
- No feedback that message has been saved. When adding a comment is concerned if the comment was saved or not. (system status not visible)
- Easily finds exit buttons.
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- Wished there were smoother transitions between hightop-level panel and lowbottom-level panel navigation.
For instance, when taking a street view lowbottom-level pannel navigation seems more natural. However, our interface provides only high-level mode change controls. - When hitting exit would like to see a confirmation that the comments added have been saved. (safety)
- Suggested that dragging with a mouse when exploring the street view would feel more natural than using some of the buttons we provided. (efficiency?)
User 4 (Acting as Raj):
Observations
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- Need notification with comments/notes
Feedback summary (What we learned)
Inconsistency with expectations:
- Users ignored panning and altitude controls. (learnability issue)
- Some description elements mistaken for buttons. (learnability issue)
- Modal navigation in top panel not clear. (learnability issue)
- Users ignored aggregation panels: map, articles. (learnability issue)
- No feedback that message has been saved. (safety issue)
- No feedback on whether Arjun read the note or not (design issue - missing feature)
Consistency with expectations:
- Users found it easy to receive and accept calls. (efficient + learnable)
- Took the time to explore locations in the google earth mode. (engaging)
- Gave positive feedback about being able to interactively view the location, while talking. (usability validated)
Prototype iteration:
When testing the first prototype which has some navigation links in the top panel and some in the bottom panel we found that users found it confusing (learnability issue)
combines high and low-level navigation styles we found that once in a low-level navigation mode users found it difficult to switch back to high-level navigation style. Our second prototype aims to provide more accessible low-navigation control for
- consistent navigation layout for all the three exploration modes: google earth view, images and tweets.
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- fix internal inconsistency issues between labels and buttons;
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- safety pop up windows to facilitate adding/saving messages and exiting modes;
- feedback -- notes saved, "seen" feedback when the message is read on the other end
- minimises the number of icons and controls.
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- although we did not encounter issues with the interface being overcrowded, knowing that our targeted user group is mainly elderly we want to maximise the easy of navigation
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- by minimizing cognitive load.
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What we changed before the next prototype:
- Labels look significantly different from buttons.
- A high visibility save button added to the type comments window for saving input.
- A pop-up window asking "Would you like to save your comment?" appears when user attempts to exit the comments mode.
- Low-level Bottom panel controls for switching between modes are added to the main active window.
- The left panel showing contacts and history is collapsed when user enters an exploration mode. The panel can be expanded by clicking an icon in the top left corner. The motivation behind this addition is to reduce cognitive load and maximise exploration area.
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- he asked about email subscription -- can I subscribe to get an email notification when Arjun puts a comment on his notes.
What we learned from prototype 2
Issues:
- Too many controls if user uses only keyboard contols -- 4 keys for camera + 4 keys for movement (how to fix this?)
- Tagging was confused with Notes/Comments w.r.t images. (learnability/consistency issue)
- some additional feature requests like -- email subscription
Good Feedback:
- Our fixes in iteration one has definitly improved the user experience a lot.
- We continuously heard that they find the system very engaging .