GR6 - User Testing

Design:

Our final design is made up of a map and a sidebar. The map contains visual representations of the dataset imported, and allows users to click on various areas of the map to get more information, manipulate and add towers. It has all of the movement functionality of Google maps, as it uses Google's API. The sidebar provides supplemental information to what is one the map. There, users can change the visibility of the two data set layers, and view certain subsets of population and rainfall data.

Implementation:

The implementation was designed with a web interface in mind. On that note, a combination of HTML, Javascript, and CSS was used to direct the proper visual representation of elements. The main element, and also challenge, of the project was the map. Both the visual appearance of the map itself and the databases that supplied information about population, rainfall, current towers, and newly added towers were generated using Fusion Tables and the Google Maps API. Given the scope of this project, this was the correct choice as trying to implement the same sort of functionality from scratch would have ended disastrously. However, using the API proved to be very difficult at times. A lot of the necessary functionality was not available in public API and therefore, sort of had to be hacked together with various workarounds. On the positive side, using Google Maps allows us the time to implement a very appealing visual style, and the familiarity of every user with the API definitely increased usability.

There are certain features that we were unable to implement due to the fact that their difficult exceeded the scope of this class. Most did not affect the usability of the design, however, and so overall, the implementation was a success.

Evaluation:

Unfortunately, due to the nature of our project, we were unable to get in contact with three users from target audience of our project (since the user population is fairly small). Instead, we used one target audience member as well as two students taken from the MIT population (although not from the 6.813 roster). The most important effect that this may have is that our target user population would like have extensive training with the software and would also be much more intimately familiar with the problem at hand. With that in mind, this is the information we presented each of our users with prior to the test:

Briefing:

Imagine you are analyst at Boingo looking to make additions to your WiFi towers in South Africa. You want to look at population and rainfall data in that region to find optimum places to add towers. Already loaded into your interface, you have 3 already existing data sets, and one dataset of new additions.
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.

Demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfDULO83dpU

Tasks:

Task 1: View the relationships between two of these sets on the map.
Task 2: Find three regions without WiFi coverage, and add new towers there.
Task 3: Analyze their costs and move the most expensive towers to places with the highest population and highest rainfall.

User 1:

Task 1: On task 1, the user did successfully locate the areas of the maps the had both high population and high rainfall. However, it seemed to take him many, many clicks and turning on and off of both layers to determine this fact. What's more, he never clicked the arrow buttons to the right of the datasets that would have allowed him more control over what he was viewing. After he had tried all of the tasks, the experimenter brought this up and asked him what he though that arrows would lead to. He correctly thought that perhaps it would be some sort of context menu, and once he used it, he thought it was very helpful.

Task 2: Adding new wifi towers was not a problem. The change in cursor after clicking the "Add Towers" button seemed to make him aware of what he needed to do pretty readily. He dragged around the towers with no problem, although resizing them was not intuitive, and he didn't really know what to make of the sliders in the pop-up window.

Task 3: The user was able to complete the task, although again, he had to repeatedly toggle the data layers (population and rainfall) on and off in order to decide where the ideal location was to place the towers. This was made slightly easier when the ability to filter out the layers was demonstrated to him.

Feedback:

The colors were a bit confusing. They seems to blend together somewhat and it was hard to tell what was what.
The legend was originally not too visible. It might be better if it were a part of the sidebar.
The menu location and general feel of the whole project was good because it reminded him of the standard Google Maps interface (sidebar and all) and that was familiar and easy to use as a result

User 2:

Task 1: On task 1, this user also successfully located the areas of the maps the had both high population and high rainfall and it took many clicks and turning on and off of both layers to determine it. Se never clicked the arrow buttons to the right of the datasets, but just looked at them as is.

Task 2: She added towers easily, and didn't really test out the popup windows much.

Task 3: She toggled the datasets visible and invisible multiple times to figure out where she wanted to put them.