Briefing
"This is EventHub. It's a website for finding, scheduling, and posting events in the near future in your vicinity. So for example, if you have a couple hours to kill after class, you can come here and find something cool to do; or, if you want to organize a dinner with friends, instead of emailing everyone and juggling replies, you can organize it here. You're entering this situation in the middle of a user 'state': you already have friends, events in your calendar, all that. We're going to give you some tasks a normal user would do, and it would be extremely helpful if you would think aloud while performing these tasks. If you become confused or frustrated, please let us know because that means that we did something wrong, and need to fix it. You are free to leave the user test at any time for any reason. Any questions before we start? <wait for response> On that note, thank you for helping us improve EventHub!"
Scenario Tasks
Task 1: You're going to a basketball game today; let people know you'll be coming late
Task 2: Create a chess game at 6:30 today
Task 3: Find friend Sara, check out her profile
Task 4: Reschedule chess game
The following tasks were added for the second iteration:
Task 5: An event you're attending has been updated. Find out what has changed. (Check your notifications)
Task 6: Edit your profile
Task 7: You want to go to the windows 7 party, but you're busy then. Browse other events in the Tech group
Prototype photos
We took pictures of our final iteration. The photos are divided roughly by task.
Task 1: You're going to a basketball game today; let people know you'll be coming late
Task 2: Create a chess game at 6:30 today
Task 3: Find friend Sara, check out her profile
Task 4: Reschedule chess game
Task 5: An event you're attending has been updated. Find out what has changed. (Check your notifications)
Task 6: Edit your profile
Task 7: You want to go to the windows 7 party, but you're busy then. Browse other events in the Tech group
Observations
Observation summary
We had the chance to work with six users in the first round and three in the second. In the first iteration, the usability problems our users encountered were largely due to confusion about minor points of the interface. User 3 was confused about the "all day" checkbox on the event creation page, and was concerned about the lack of content in the main frame of the friends page - initially the main frame was empty and the only content was a list of friends in the sidebar. This was ameliorated with the second iteration, as we added content to the main frame in the form of a list of friends' events. User 5 was confused about the process of adding friends to an event, which seemed to spout from the improper wording of our directions. We changed "add friends from toolbar" to "add friends from sidebar" as per User 6's suggestion, and there were no further questions or difficulties with adding friends to events.
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