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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 a computer and 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.

Process

We followed the following set of steps with each test user. We made sure that the test environment was as standardized as possible.

  1. The facilitator reads the briefing (see Briefing section) to the test user.
  2. The facilitator reads each task one by one (see Tasks section). After each task is read, the user attempts to complete the task while vocalizing their feedback. Where appropriate, the facilitator encourages the user to provide feedback.
  3. The observer records the feedback given by the test user.
Roles
  • Susie Fu facilitated the test.
  • Emily Zhao observed the users.
  • Ashutosh Singhal was on call to perform last minute bug fixes.
Briefing

Our application is Wishdex.com, a site that helps you keep wishlists. You can keep track of items you find online, show your friends and family gifts you want for Christmas or your birthday, and see what your friends are interested in or check out popular items on the site. We're doing this test to get some feedback on how well we've designed the user interface. There are probably a lot of problems with the design, and we need help finding them. Keep in mind that we're testing the computer system, not you. Also, the results of this test will be kept completely confidential, and you can stop and leave the test at any time. My name is Susie, and I'll be reading out the tasks we want you to perform. This is Emily, and she'll be taking some notes to help us remember the problems we find.

Note that we did not use a demo as part of our briefing. The motivation for this was that we wanted our site to be usable without a demo to the test users we were able to find. We designed Wishdex.com to be a site that someone who falls under our target test definition can go to and instantly be able to use.

Tasks
  1. Log in
  2. Managing
    1. Create a new wishdex called "Birthday Wishlist"
    2. Add new item from Anthropologie.com to this wishdex
    3. After adding the item, change the item description
    4. Create another wishdex "Christmas" and move this item to the 2nd wishdex
    5. Share "Christmas" with your mom
    6. After some thought, you decided to buy this item on Anthropologie.com. You still want to keep the item on your wishdex, though, but you want to mark that you've acquired it.
    7. Delete an item
  3. Exploring
    1. Browse popular wishdexes on the Popular page
    2. Check out the recent activity
  4. Friends
    1. Find Emily's wishdex, "Cool Patterns"
    2. Like one of the dresses in her Wishdex
    3. You want to buy this item for her, so claim the item and view the item on the Anthropologie.com website
    4. Copy an item that you like into your own "Birthday Wishlist" wishdex
Usability Problems Found

Assign each problem a severity rating (cosmetic, minor, major, catastrophic)

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.

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