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Design Decisions

Prototyping

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Heuristic Evaluation

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• Users were concerned with safety, something that we had egregiously failed to address in the carpool search portion of our paper prototype. While originally users could search for any carpool and look up potential carpooling partners' addresses without even logging in, the current version of our site requires the user to input an ID code (that they should have received from the activity instructor) in order to search for their activity. In addition, users cannot view other users until they have logged in.
• Our original interface for swapping dates, which was merged with the My Carpools tab, was very confusing for users because it lacked explanation and was not intuitive. To fix this, we decided to move the swapping interface under its own separate tab because 1) we predicted that it would be a commonly used feature, and 2) if it had its own tab, we would have more space to briefly provide instructions.
• The original form for sending swap requests did not include the names of the other users with whom the user would be swapping because we did not think that information would be relevant. However, most test users indicated that they were interested in knowing who they would be swapping with, so we decided to change our form to include this.
• The original form for accepting swap requests was inefficient because it involved multiple steps, which were somewhat redundant with each other. We decided to condense the form into a single step.
• For the web app overall, we noticed that the ordering of the tabs from left to right was important; users stopped scanning once they thought they had found what they wanted, failing to realize that we had included shortcut tabs further to the right. We decided to reorder the tabs so that shortcut tabs, such as Next Date and Swap Dates, would be located further to the left and thus appear more immediately obvious to the user.
• In the paper prototype of our mobile app, the option to enable ride tracking was confusing for users. The original wording on the button was "Track Ride," which didn't make sense because users couldn't understand why they would want to track their own ride. To fix this, we changed the wording to "Enable Ride Tracking."

Heuristic Evaluation

User Testing

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Implementation

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