GR3 - Paper Prototypes

Prototype Photos

Photos

Description

User testing in progress

Artist Similarity page with some user-selected concerts

Venue information page with the same selected concerts.


Concert information page with music samples and interested friends.

Briefing

Hi. In this experiment you are playing a musician named Sparklepony using the ConcertBOS site to find a concert to be inspired by.

This site allows you to visualize information about concerts in the greater Boston area, allowing you to find concerts that meet certain criteria, find friends who may be interested in the concert, and find additional details about the artist or venue.

This experiment is intended to bring out flaws in the interface.  We've sketched out a simple version of the interface to work through, where we play the role of the computer.  Pretend you're interacting with a website.  As you work through the tasks we've given you, we'd appreciate it if you would tell us what you're thinking, especially if you get stuck or confused.  This means that there's something wrong with our design, and knowing what you're thinking will help us fix it.

Thanks for helping with our project, and keep in mind that you can stop at any time.

Scenario Tasks

  1. Find a concert that meets the following criteria:
    1. Most importantly, the artist has to be somewhat similar to Sparklepony.
    2. around $40
    3. some time in the next month
  2. Find a friend to go with, and invite this friend along.
  3. Research the venue.
    1. Not a large venue: less than 400 people
    2. Standing room only.

Observations

Prototypes

Iteration 1

User

Task 1:
Find a Concert that meets the following criteria

Task 2:
Find and Invite a friend

Task 3:
Research the Venue

General User Feedback

Notes

1

  • They completely missed the filter sidebar, and didn't really make use of the visualization.
  • Color gradients might not be the best way to express the filtering. The user really liked the idea after it was explained to them, but said that it was initially non-obvious.
  • They really liked the artist similarity graph.
  • She didn't really have an issue finding and inviting a friend.
  • The user was very happy with the details we provided for the venue, and completed this task easily.
  • The user said that indicating clickability was difficult, but that's something we've had issues with on a paper prototype.

Female. User seemed confused at the beginning, had a lot of trouble orienting themselves/figuring out the paper prototyping modality

2

  • They started looking specifically at time, not artists. Briefing error?
  • The user said that hard filtering would be just as useful as the gradient. They said that the gradient would just look like visual sugar.
  • They invited a friend straight from the concert page. They never hit the friend visualization.
  • User 2 wanted to be able to change the invitation message.
  • Said that a venue filter would be cool: on any page, you can filter by small, medium, or large venues.
  • Wanted a way to see more concerts at a specific venue (a more extensive upcoming concerts list)
  •  Wanted hard filters - he didn't like the gradient around pricing - everything in a selected range should simply be the same color or removed if not in the selected range.
  • Wanted a way to see all of the events at a single venue.

Male. User was very familiar with visualizations and design, so his comfort level may have been higher than the average user. Said he buys tickets way in advance, so he heavily researches concerts and only goes to ones for artists he is very familiar with. Would not be using this as a discovery tool, more for organization by pricing, date, friends.

3

  • On the first landing page, they were looking for a search bar or something.
  • User 3 was very confused by the Artist Similarity page.
    • they weren't really sure where the information was from, or what the graph meant.
    • like the other users, didn't realize that you could drag and curate concerts.
  • User 3 found the friend from the concert page, and never hit the friend page.
  • User 3 wanted a way to publish invitation information on other sites like Twitter or Facebook.
  • They wanted a map for the venue page.
  • No difficulties
  • User 3 wanted a way to buy tickets. Suggested linking to Ticketmaster.

Female. Pointed out social aspects of inviting friends - do you do it over facebook or twitter or have connectivity for that? She wanted a way to tell everyone she was going to x concert, potentially with y people. Brought up the issue that publicly inviting friends over twitter or facebook could potentially be bad socially (if people felt excluded) so it must be approached with caution. It could also be used in positive ways to make more people interested in attending a given concert.


Changes

  • instead of dragging bubbles to indicate interest, click bubbles, added a more button to the bubbles
  • Splash page
    • changed links to text boxes to enter things in (need to change the go page)
  • added maps and price to concert page
  • changed price from gradient to categories
  • date slider is now two sliders

Iteration 2

User

Task 1:
Find a Concert that meets the following criteria

Task 2:
Find and Invite a friend

Task 3:
Research the Venue

General Feedback

Notes

4

  • Put limits/label axes on the pricing slider
  • Filtering was similar to Kayak flight searching filters (so easier to understand, user said that the external consistency was useful)
  • Didn't have difficulty with this task but had difficulty transitioning to Task 2
  • Wanted ability to invite friends from concert page
  • Said that having friends in concert page sidebar would be useful
  • Looked for a centralized Invite/Concert manager
  • No difficulties with this task
  • 3 Go buttons on the splash page were confusing
  • Put an "x" on the selected concerts to take it out of the "interested" list
  • Make the "+/More" button on the concerts more obvious

Female.

5

  • Didn't try to fill in everything before hitting "Go" which is what we intended
  • Really liked the idea of curating concerts on the sidebar
  • Played with all of the filters to get an idea of the interactivity on the visualization, hit all the buttons on the page
  • Wanted Buttons to be more pronounced
  • Had difficulty transitioning to Task 2, but figured it out once she started curating concerts
  • Took a long time
  • Suggested that we should make it obvious that you could invite friends because couldn't tell from splash page
  • Had difficulties finding the page
  • Wanted artist similarity page to stay static with a box below that filled in with info about concert and friend info

Female.

6

  • Couldn't find friend
  • Too many Go buttons
  • Didn't realize that the visualization was organized by similarity. Attributed that to size of prototype.
  • Wanted to be able to select a subset of friends to invite to a subset of concerts, ie, should be able to pick 2 concerts, some set of friends, and invite said subgroup to both concerts.
  • Asked "which concert am I inviting them to?" So need to make an indication of which concert the user is on more clear.
  • Had difficulties finding page
  • Wanted better way to get to concert info
  • Wanted to be able to see specific ticket prices across different pages
  • Really liked that list of interested concerts stayed the same across all pages
  • Wanted a comparison feature in order to be able to directly compare concerts.

Male.

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