GR2 - Designs
Task Analysis
Before coming up with our scenario, we analyzed the needs of the two user groups we were focusing on (the Story Tourists and Tour Guides) and came up with 4 higher level tasks that would be important to our user groups and which needed to be accomplished through our designs:
- Find out about events on campus
- Facilitate interaction between tour guides and tourists
- Facilitate student-tourist interactions
- Find out about general stats/frequently asked general questions easily
Scenario
Alex is a sophomore tour guide at college. He is a current Engineering major who lives in one of the co-ed dorms on campus. Aside from Engineering, he is involved in intramural sports and is an editor for the college newspaper.
Taylor is a junior at public high school. Taylor is curious about what dorm life is in college. He is a potential business major and is curious about Greek life.
Alex is assigned to be a tour guide to a morning tour group, which includes Taylor. Throughout the tour, Taylor hangs out near the back of the group. At the beginning of the tour, Taylor checks the system for frequently asked general questions about the college and skims the information on Alex (Task 4). Whenever Taylor has a question, he asks it to the system. Alex is able to check the questions asked to the system, and then reply to the group (Task 2).
Halfway through the tour, Taylor notices through the system that the campus is in the middle of Greek Week. Using the system he takes not of the event (Task 1). Taylor find that the tour is lacking in stories about living in one of the dorms he's interested in. He uses the system to look at descriptions of the dorm by other students (Task 3).
At the end of the tour, Taylor provides Alex feedback on the tour through the system (Task 2). He is then able to set up a tour of the dorm he's interested in, with one of the students who had a description in the system. He sees through the system that the student is a business major and plans to ask the student questions about the college's business school and more about the major (Task 3).
Individual Designs
Individual Designs - Evan Moore
Individual Designs - Tara Krishnan
Individual Designs - Carlo Biedenharn
Designs
1. Mobile Design
2. Map Based Design
[Show this design|6DOT813sp13:Map BasedLearnability - One of the downsides to this design is that the icons do not have any text associated with them. So although the icons represent visually what they lead to, a new user may not know what they are for until they click on it to find out. Another learnability issue is that currently there are no affordances to let a user know that they can click on a building to see the stories associated with it. One idea would be to add "pins" on every location with a story, but that could lead to too many pins and overwhelm a new user. A plus for learnability is that the map is always visible, so that the User can always see where they are.
Efficiency - By placing the icons in the corner and to the side, we somewhat increase efficiency by Fitt's law (the "size" of the icons grow on the edge). Having the time left and the guide name always at the top ensures that the user never has to go to another page to see it. In fact, every task is done on the same page, but with modal dialogs or sidebars doing it. This way, the user does not have to go through another page to get to where they want. A downside to efficiency is that the Tour guide has to linearly look through every question instead of seeing them all at once.
Safety - Every "mode" (i.e. clicking on the question mark or calendar) that triggers a sidebar can be undone by clicking on the icon again. A downside is that theoretically, the map is still "active" after triggering a sidebar. So if the user accidentally misses the text box on the bottom when asking a question for example, they could land on a building on the map instead and trigger the stories view, confusing them.
Design]