As usual, be complete, deep, and concise. Tidy up your entire wiki to make it a usable presentation of your term project. If your project changed direction or scope over the course of the semester, update earlier sections (such as the original Problem section you wrote for GR1) to reflect your final project.
Design
Describe the final design of your interface. Illustrate with screenshots. Point out important design decisions and discuss the design alternatives that you considered. Particularly, discuss design decisions that were motivated by the three evaluations you did (paper prototyping, heuristic evaluation, and user testing).
Implementation
Describe the internals of your implementation, but keep the discussion on a high level. Discuss important design decisions you made in the implementation. Also discuss how implementation problems may have affected the usability of your interface.
Evaluation
We conducted a user test on Sunday, May 8th, 2011 at the MIT Student Center.
We looked for three users who would be representative of our target user population. Our target user population was users in the 18-30 age range who felt comfortable using computers to surf the Internet or do work. The logic behind this was that Wishdex is an online shopping tool for indexing items found while shopping online or browsing the Internet. The tool would only be useful if the user felt comfortable using the computer and other online shopping sites. The users we managed to find were all fellow students who fell in this target age range.
We approached students who were already sitting in front of a computer, in the MIT Student Center computer cluster. We found two female and one male test user. Our target user population is skewed towards the female population, because we observed that female students tend to shop online more frequently. However, we built Wishdex with the hope that it would appeal to male users as well, and made sure to find at least one male test user.
Roles
- Susie Fu facilitated the test.
- Emily Zhao observed the users.
- Ashutosh Singhal was on call to perform last minute bug fixes.
Describe how the users were briefed and what tasks they performed; if you did a demo for them as part of your briefing, justify that decision.
Prepare a briefing and tasks. These may be the same ones that you used in paper prototyping, but you may need to improve them based on feedback from the paper prototyping.
Collect the usability problems found by your user tests into a list. Assign each problem a severity rating (cosmetic, minor, major, catastrophic), and brainstorm possible solutions for the problems.
Reflection
Discuss what you learned over the course of the iterative design process. If you did it again, what would you do differently? Focus in this part not on the specific design decisions of your project (which you already discussed in the Design section), but instead on the meta-level decisions about your design process: your risk assessments, your decisions about what features to prototype and which prototype techniques to use, and how you evaluated the results of your observations.