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Adding an injury to a student takes the user to this page, where he or she adds the basic information needed to update the athlete's profile page. It also has not changed much since the paper prototypes.
Evaluation
Users:
We conducted our user test with one MIT athletic trainer and two MIT students who have had a lot of encounters with athletic trainers. Since the site is a tool for athletic trainers, the athletic trainer is the core of our target population. The MIT students both have had experience as assistant athletic trainers and were familiar with the needs of a trainer.
Briefing:
The users were given basic information of the class and intentions of our website. They were told that we would give them a set of tasks, observe them while they completed the tasks, and discuss any suggestions afterwards.
Tasks:
1. Create a new athlete, Josh Smith, and update his injury status to reflect a broken ankle.
2. Mark Kobe as healthy.
3. Remove lunges from his workout and add Clean and jerk (3x15) and add rows (3x10).
4. Add a note to his profile saying that he’s recovered from his injury.
Usability Problems:
Trainer:
The user didn’t recognize a body area in the ‘create a workout’ tab and tried clicking ‘select a different body area’ label to search for it. We should just make the label a search bar for body areas not being displayed.
In the add a new injury form you should be able to enter the date as the word instead of numerical. We should just replace the input box with a dropdown.
The drag and drop functionality in ‘create a workout’ wasn’t obvious at first. We tried fixing this by adding a label saying ‘drage exercises here’ where a workout would go when the workout program is empty. In a real scenario the user would see this message before beginning to create a workout and there should not be a problem.
He missed the significance of the colors in the note section. Perhaps we could make selecting a color change the background of the input text box also to indicate the message will have that background.
He felt like we should be able to edit multiple days of reps for a single exercise at once.
He also said it would be nice to have a way to contact the athlete when updates to his profile are performed.
He thinks the dashboard player boxes should have more information such as the most recent note. He also suggested that a sort of news feed for recent injuries and notes could be nice to have on the dashboard also.
Student 1:
When told to update a player’s injury status, this user was confused by the ‘select a body area’ list in the ‘create a workout’ tab. Perhaps the create a workout area should be grayed out when the player is healthy. This would take attention away for it and allow the user to look at all of the page and see the injury section.
This user understood the significance of and used the colors for athlete notes.
When looking for Kobe Bryant it took this user a long time to find the athletes bar. Also when he found it he said that with the number of athletes a trainer is actively treating, showing them all in a dropdown is not very realistic. If we replaced the athletes dropdown with a search bar the user would be more likely to see it and know it needs to use it to find additional athletes.
This user had no problem at all creating a workout.
Student 2:
No problem creating athlete
“how do I find kobe bryant?” It took him a long time to find the athletes dropdown. The same suggestion applies from above.
He struggled to find how to add exercises (clicked around until he found the side bar). Maybe we could make the workout locked in, and require the user to enable editing once a workout is set. Then the area would be in his field of view and more clear.
When trying to add an exercise he kept clicking the clean and jerk button (eventually figured out that he needed to drag and drop). The drag exercises here message should also be displayed on click and not just drag.
He had no problem changing sets/reps, or adding a note.
To add an injury, his first instinct to click injury history, but he found the actual button immediately after. No real problem here.
Reflection
There were two big things we took away from this course that we think we had all undervalued prior to the course; prototyping, and user testing. Most of us thought that going into this class we would learn more about what makes a good UI rather than the process of creating one. Even when presented with these ideas, some of us thought the idea of creating a paper prototype wasn't worth the time. It seemed nearly as easy to make the website in html and then later change whatever small things needed to be changed. I don't think any of us realized that getting a good UI on the first try just isn't going to happen, and the paper prototypes definitely allowed us to see problems with our UI before we created it. It was pretty surprising how some of the elements in our UI that we considered intuitive were anything but to the users we tested.