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- Brief users with following brief:
Panel Collector’s Catalogue allows users to view and organize their collections on the go. By tagging and taking pictures of items, users can keep track of and search their large collections through visual recognition, without having to recall solely from memory.
Remember that we are testing the application, not you. Feel free to explore, and think your actions out aloud. If you find yourself confused, or wishing for something extra, let us know, and again, feel free to comment out loud with any observations you make.
This session should be fun, so relax and make yourself comfortable. If at any time you want to stop, you are free to do so. Thank you for taking the time to help us user test the application.
- Ask users to preform following tasks:
Panel 1) Create a new collection, and add some items with photos and tags.
2) Share your new collection with a friend for viewing.
3) Starting from the Home screen, quickly search for a crab.
4) Delete the “imaginary” animal item, since it doesn’t belong.
5) You decide you need some help managing your board games, so you share the collection with a friend, and let them co-manage it with you.
6) Go back to the collection you created, and set one of your items to be the collection thumbnail.
7) From the Home screen, make a new board game item and add it to the app.
8) Finally, you’ve decided that you have too many shoes, so you want to delete your entire shoe collection
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User testing notes
User Test | Notes | Debriefing and Conclusions |
|---|---|---|
1 | Tasks:
| Misc: thumbnail removing seems consistent, when you remove collection selections. |
Usability Problems:
Second
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Third User Test
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2 | Tasks:
| Debriefing: I think it’s pretty simple to use. Does the filter search by tag and text? I don’t think it’s bad to use, I got stuck on trying to set thumbnails for the collection, but other than that I think it’s pretty intuitive! There’s multiple ways of doing a lot of actions, I just noticed I can make a new item from the home screen, but it makes more sense to go from a collection to item, than directly to an item. |
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3 | Tasks:
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When picture is being taken, the Cancel/Retake/Done menu is landscape as opposed to portrait. |
Reflection
- In general, we found this class highly rewarding to learning about user-centered software design. Though the Spiral Model is frequently preached in other software development classes, only in this class is it truly emphasized. Cheap iterations played a large role in honing out developed UI ideas, preventing us from spending the effort to implement a feature that was not well-received.
- In the future, one thing I would find particularly useful is another round of paper prototyping, especially evaluating design decisions we were not totally sure about. In user testing stage, we should be more persistent about clarifying what exactly was difficult about a particular task, if any difficulty is found.
- One very core thing we learned as a team was the discrepancy between the mind of the user and the mind of the designer. Things that were immediately clear to us was not necessarily the case for our users. In this respect, user testing was invaluable. Even our hardest efforts to think from the user's standpoint did not reveal nearly as much as a paper prototype in front of an user.
- One thing we would change in the future is to draft more realistic paper prototypes. Templating tools have readily available Android UI toolkits, which would easily give us a more realistic paper prototype. This may trade the perceived cheapness of the prototype, but we believe that a prototype that visually looks more similar to an actual app has more perceived affordance than a hand-drawn one.