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MIT House Managers and mechanics have to coordinate to complete house repairs. Currently:-
- House Managers get bombarded with emails requesting house repairs.
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- House Managers then delegate those requests to mechanics via phone or walkie-talkie.
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- House Managers coordinate repair job progress via phone or walkie-talkie.
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- All repair job progress is managed in House Managers' heads/makeshift record books.
Our application speeds up this repair process by being a centralized, organized hub for House Managers to identify/prioritize important repair jobs, to delegate said jobs to mechanics, and to then monitor repair job progress.
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- Identify the date, time, and location of the most recently completed repair job.
- View more information about the McCormick light bulb repair job.
- Star the McCormick light bulb repair job.
- Assign the light bulb repair job to Jenks Jenkinson, the house mechanic.
- View any new notifications and read them.
- Look up contact information for Home Depot in order to place an order for light bulbs.
- Make a non-urgent note on the light bulb repair job indicating that supplies have been ordered and will be available Wednesday afternoon.
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Observations:
Iteration #1:
- Users A, D, E, and F were overwhelmed by data and were not sure where to look when they first saw the page.
- Users A, B, and F were confused about the relationship between the middle and right panels
- Users B and D had trouble marking a job as important. They saw a “Mark complete” button in the right panel and expected there to be a comparable button in that panel for marking importance, but there was not one.
- A couple users assumed an update listed in the right side panel was a “notification” (the term “notification” is used in task 5). Users did not seem to be completely aware of the notification alert widget in our interface.
- User A tried to assign a job to a worker by clicking the “unassigned” icon on the job listing in the middle panel
- User A was confused about why, after she assigned a job to a worker, details about the job still appeared in the right panel
- User E was confused why when he selected a worker with the drop-down selector in the right panel the worker wasn’t automatically assigned (our system requires the user to press the “Assign” button to confirm the selection).
- User E felt that the search bar and scrollbar in the address book should be more obvious.
- User F thought there were too many panels on the screen, and that the left tab panel especially was too much. She said she would have instead prefered a drop-down menu at the top of the screen for filtering.
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Change | Iteration #1 | Iteration #2 |
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In Iteration #1, users felt bombarded with text/information when they first looked at the application. | | |
In Iteration #1, users did not understand the connection between the middle and right panels. | | |
Users had difficulties finding how to mark a task as important. | | |
Users wanted to use the tabs on the left. | | |
Studio Feedback
It seemed like prioritization of tasks was one of your main need that you found in GR1
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It sounds like the second prototyping went well, maybe a third round can be done before you start implementing your product.
- Noted.
Appendix (raw user test observations):
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Iteration #1:
User Test A-
- Didn’t realize the entries in the middle panel were job listings at first.
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- Unsure about the link between middle panel and right panel.
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- To assign a job to a mechanic, attempted to click the “Unassigned” icon on the job listing.
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- Was confused why details about the lightbulb job were still open on the screen after the job was assigned to a work
User Test B-
- Scanned the right panel furiously to find out how to mark job as important. Really wanted a way to mark job as important in right side panel.
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- need physical link between job listings (one suggestion was an arrowed panel divider between a job listing and details)
User Test C
UI suggestions
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- What happens when the screen is very small (w/ 13-inch hardware or mobile)? Does text just get scrunched up or are certain things not displayed?
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- Wrench logo can be mistaken for ‘Settings’ icon.
- Feature suggestions
---Questions-
- Is there any way of tagging things? Is there any way of setting defaults for/identifying recurrent job problems?
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- How am i going to assign more than one worker to a particular job?
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- What is going on on the mechanic side of things? How is priority reflected on the mechanic side of things?
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- Can I aggregate job listings to increase efficiency of doing one operation over multiple jobs?
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- Thrown off by fact that address book information would be in this app.
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- Don't know how to add contacts to our address book.
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- Any way housing manager can make private updates/notes?
User Test D-
- Maybe put a “mark important” button or star in the right pane as well? (right now it’s only on the central pane with the main list of jobs
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- Was confused about the difference between notifications and updates (I think this was more just an issue with the prototype and wouldn’t be an issue on the computer)
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- At first a little overwhelmed with all the text
User Test E-
- “assign should be automatic, no? why click “assigned”?”
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- information overload → especially for beginning user
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- search bar and scrollbar for address book should be more obvious
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- how to filter the jobs when I type in search bar
User Test F-
- info overload? any way to only display relevant info?
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- right side panel not easily linked to left side panel?
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- change tabs on left side to be drop down menu at the top
Iteration #2
User Test G-
- tried to drag a job into the right pane when it said “No job selected”
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- When trying to find notifications, wanted to look in unassigned section
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- Tried to use scrollbar
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- Was expecting a number to appear next to ALL like in gmail
User Test H-
- could not notice the notifications button
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- confused about the update instruction <-- lack of clarity on the update instruction
User Test I-
- wanted to look in unassigned area of notifications
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- thought it would be cool if by clicking on Home Depot you could be redirected to the purchasing website
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- wanted to ask about long term to
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- for area or label
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- might be cool if the house manager could see, for a given worker, which jobs are assigned to him