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We found that users do not always know what is best for themselves. Our design once included groups, which were displayed with user-chosen colors. Users could chose any color from a color swatch - their freedom was enormous! We imagined users carefully picking colors that were easy to distinguish.
Instead, this happened:
As at least two of our heuristic evaluations commented, some color choices make the name of the company incredibly difficult to read. Our testers weren't employing the careful consideration we'd imagined, and our interface lost usability.
We know now that a better way to implement the colors would have been to give our users more help in not we should have prevented our users from making this sort of mistake - perhaps automatically adjusting the font color to contrast with the background color, or restricting the colors to those that make a black font readable, or showing the user a preview. User freedom takes more planning than we thought!
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We noticed that our testers varied dramatically in their ability to interact ease of interaction with the interface. Some sailed through our tasks like they'd been using the interface for months; others made many mistakes. Similarly some of our evaluators were alone in disliking certain aspects of our interface strongly. While some individuals raised very helpful points on their own, we found that most of our major changes came about as a result of noticing trends in the way people interacted with our interface.
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Even so, each iteration seemed to bring on a whole new onslaught of problems. Even now we have a list of improvements for our interface that came up in discussion with our userslast user test.
...so make the most of the strengths of each design step.
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