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This is the version of the homepage that Ginny will see until her clothes are finished washing. It's nearly identical to the previous screen.
This is another version of the homepage that Ginny would have seen at the beginning of the workflow if there were no open washers or dryers.
Analysis
Learnability
This design features self consistency, well-known UI features such as buttons and popovers, and guided start-to-finish workflow. Because of this, we feel this design is very learnable. Perhaps the one place in the design lacking in learnability is in the exchange of messages between users. It is unclear to the user how he/she'd view a message sent from another user, or how he/she'd reply to such a message.
Use of timers and counts adds to the useful information presented immediately to the user, making this design clear and learnable.
Efficiency
This design has a few efficiency issues. First, using the workflow model, while great for learnability, can potentially slow down an experienced user. Adding some sort of bypass for experienced users might be beneficial. Second, since the washer and dryer workflows are separated very early on in the process, a user cannot select washers and dryers at the same time. A possible solution to this would be to move the split of the two further down the workflow, or remove it entirely; the consequences of this would be a more cluttered design and, in our opinion, a worse user experience.
Safety
There are a few safety issues in this design. When leaving a message for another user, there is no indication that the user can save the message for later use. Additionally, there's no clear way for the user to load a previously saved message. Additionally, the user is not forced to view the note of the previous user when they're trying to use a machine. This could lead to users ignoring other user's notes. Finally, the use of the word "Claim" is a bit of a misnomer, since our system can't allow a user to actually claim a machine. "View" or "Use" would probably be a better word, and this will be carefully thought about over the next weeks.