We conducted our user testing essentially exactly the same way we did paper prototyping. Instead of a paper Iphone, we used the real thing. All of our users were MIT students, familiar with meme culture, and Iphone users. The briefing was exactly the same as in the paper prototype (pdf attached). The user’s tasks were as follows:
Task 1:
Your first task is to create a new meme template, add text to it, and share it on Facebook.
Task 2:
Your second task is to create a meme using an existing meme template.
Task 3:
Finally, please locate one of your previously created memes and share it on Twitter.
Usability Issues:
The biggest thing that this round of usability helped us catch was back button functionality. This was not a problem in the paper prototype because when a user clicked the back button, we would just redirect them to whatever made the most sense. However, in the actual version of the app, we failed to implement them as such. This resulted in some misleading back button usage.
Additionally, several of our users tried to select a template by clicking on its picture, even though there was an adjacent select button. We could probably remove the select button altogether and let the picture be the link.