GR3 - Paper Prototyping
Prototype Photos
User Briefing
Analyst's Notebook is a data analytics application for which we are creating a new User Interface. You are an analyst trying to find optimal locations to build WiFi towers in Africa. You have 4 data sets, already loaded into the application for you. Useful background information:
Satellites (going up in 2013-2014) will provide WiFi coverage over Africa, but their frequency range can't transmit signals through rain. WiFi towers do work in rain. Many African tribes are nomadic, moving around in search of water and food. Your job is to find locations for new towers to maximize the number of people with WiFi access, taking into account the data.
Scenario Tasks
Task 1:unmigrated-wiki-markup
\[Import available data sets and\] view the relationships between three of these sets on the map.
Have one tab with overlayed data and one with intersected data so you can analyze the difference.
...
Find the tower with the highest cost and move it north.
Observations
Adding Towers
When our "Add Towers" button was located directly underneath the list of current data sets it was not intuitive what that button was for. Some comments we got about that included:
...
- screen size will matter (especially for whether split screen is feasible)
Prototype Iteration
Initially, we were debating between two versions of the panel called either "Layers" or "Data Sets." While user feedback was split, we decided to go with "Data Sets" for future iterations. 
Overlay/Intersect
Tabs
Add Towers button
Data set list more options
querying/statistics
: We added this button to give the user more ways to find relationships between data sets.
We tried several different ways of having the user add new WiFi towers to the map. We initially had an "Add Towers" button that would automatically add some number of WiFi towers to the map. When we had the button directly beneath the list of layers, it was confusing for users because the task of adding towers was not logically connected to filtering layer views. We moved the button to the bottom in the next iteration.
We later decided to have an "Options" panel that would appear beneath the data sets, to make the application more flexible. We tried to have the user click on the data sets to access its options, but this was not immediately obvious and took the user a while to figure out. After the user testing, we realized we should have a small options icon next to each data set.
Additional pictures:
In the future, we hope to add a UI for querying the data and generating statistics. This will be an expansion of the "percent coverage" in the top-right corner.