Next Ride GR3: paper prototyping

Prototype Photos

landing page, main scheduling page blank, main scheduling page with scheduled rides, request page, reserve page, M

This is the landing page of the application. It shows the users their next ride (offer, reservation or request) as well as the upcoming rides to and from the house. This page is designed to provide an efficient way for users to find the next ride to their intended destination. In order to make it easier for users to quickly see how much time they have until the next ride the times are give in time until ride, not absolute time.

This is the primary scheduling page, in this case blank (no rides or requests). There are three tabs, one for rides to the house, one for rides to campus, and a final tab (called ME) that contains your personal settings and your rides. 


This is the same schedule with rides and requests on the schedule page. The request are on the right side of the page and are shown by line segments that signify the time range that they are looking for rides. Rides are horizontals lines with an icon and a number on it. The icon will signify the type of vehicle it is: van, car and taxi. The number signifies how many spots are still available on the vehicle.

To create a request, you drag and pull and let go to create a bar this will then open up this request page. Which has clickable arrows that defaults to 1 for how many people you are requesting a ride. Again the date is purposely not changeable.  Requests have time ranges, so you can define the time range that you can change. It defaults more where you clicked and dragged to 

To reserve a ride you click on one of the icons, this brings you to this page. Again has a consistent format for how to choose the number of seats your booking (it also shows how many are available and does not let you choose more than are available). It shoes who the driver is, what vehicle he is driving and the time.  It also displays the drivers phone number ( not written in here) and any notes the driver might have written. The Submit and cancel page are in the same spot on each of these pages.

has clickable arrows that defaults to 4, to show how many spots you are willing to offer. Then the day cannot be changed. Then the time defaults to roughly where you clicked with your fingers. There is also a section to leave any notes for the riders.

On the top shoes your information like name and phone number in case you would like to change it. Then it shows all your pending offers reservations and request. The arrow on the right lets your expand and collapse the sections. Collapsed sections display a number  of things in that category. Expanded sections show time, direction,  people , and icon. And there is an arrow with an extra icon.

Briefing

NextRide is a mobile phone application to allow brothers and friends of a fraternity (more specifically our fraternity ZBT) to schedule, request and find rides between campus and the house. The application includes the ability to schedule the house's 15 passenger van, cars, and cabs.

Scenario Tasks

  • Charles woke up at the house at 11am and is planning on driving to campus today. He needs to be there by 3pm but doesn’t really care when he goes so he is willing to give people a ride and leave whenever it is more convenient for others. He is going to check to see when people have requested a ride. He is then going to schedule a ride for the time with the most requests.
  • Alexis is on campus at 3am and he wants to get to the house by 5am. He is flexible on when he is leaving but he knows he can’t leave in the next 30 min. MIT Saferide and the T have both stopped running for the night and it is too cold to walk all the way to the house so he wants someone to give him a ride but he would also not mind getting a cab. He wants to use NextRide to request a ride and also offer a cab.
  • It’s 11am right now. Jorge is at the house and needs to get to campus before 1pm. He doesn’t care when he goes as long as he gets a ride before one. Jorge wants to look at the available rides and reserves himself a spot on a ride at 12:30pm.

Observations

Task 1

Task 2

Task 3

  • Splash page rather intuitive, he did not realize the times could be clicked on
  • Clicked on view schedule
  • User logged in no problem
  • First user was very confused on the schedule page (no ride and request headers)
  • Was not super confident but ended up clicking on the left side to create a ride.
  • Offer page was intuitive flew by no problem
  • When asked to find his offer user tried to click the offer he created but that spawned a reserve page (this was duly noted)
  • Again no problem with splash and main schedule page (especially since we added labels between the different user tasks)
  • User was slightly unsure if the cab was an offer or request, however , he ended up creating it as an offer.
  • Since he had already done task 1 he flew by the page no problem (means efficiency is high)
  • Looking at request the user understood to click and drag on the right side of the screen ( we were very happy about this) this brought them up to request page and again the user did well.
  • The rest went well.
  • Confused why we had two buttons on the splash page that led to the same schedule page with tabs.
  • Had no problem with log in page.
  • Was unsure about the schedule organization. Thought the icons made it clear for what the available rides were but said that the vertical lines were confusing. We clarified this.
  • Asked how to see people that reserved spots in the ride he offered.
  • Wasn't clear what the numbers written inside the vehicle icons meant.
  • User confused about cabs. Was not sure if it was supposed to be an offer or a request. He ended up creating it as an offer.
  • User instinctively clicked on a car icon to try to reserve a spot on a scheduled ride.

Task 1

Task 2

Task 3

  • What does the splash page do if I haven’t logged in yet?
  • I want to see the names of the people requesting rides. Can I do that?
  • Won’t the requests get confusing if there’s a lot of them
  • Maybe you should show a number in the request to show the number of people on it
  • I like how that line intersects the requests
  • This isn't this task but can I schedule a recurring ride?
  • What the hell is this schedule page? It’s all blank? What do I do?
  • User tried to click the “requests” header on the column, expected something to happen
  • How do I find out if someone offers a ride later?
  • Can I click on the car thing? Is that clickable?
  • I’m not sure if that’s the number of seats left in the car or the number of seats taken
  • Dude, can I ride b*tch? (be a 6th person in a 5 person car)
  • if I just forgot something at the house it would be cool if I could see the people in
    the car so I could call one of them and ask them to get something for me and bring it to campus
  • Show the nearby request times when I’m offering a ride so I can get the most people
  • Instead of just reducing the number of seats, can I actually add people to my ride?
  • Where do I see who’s in my car?
  • I’m willing to take a cab, what am I supposed to do? Should I ‘offer’ a cab?
  • Does my request show up on the home page even though its not a ride?
  • Can I get auto-added to a ride if one happens when I requested?
  • That drag thing for requesting is pretty slick
  • Can I drag the endpoints around to change the time?
  • Where is the number of seats I requested?
  • Oh, I could have clicked a ride from the home page?
  • Can I see who else is in the car? So I can ask them to remind me or something.
  • Can I see which car is mine on this?
  • Can I get text notifications when someone adds on to my ride?
  • I wish I could see the names of the people requesting
  • Yeah, it’s definitely not clear that I’m supposed to do this click and drag thing.
  • Wait, what does it change that I'm willing to take a cab? How does that work?
  • Will it text me if someone offers a ride?
  • Yeah, its not clear I click on the cars, they don't look very clicky

Prototype Iterations

Changes that occurred between the first ans second iterations are:

  • Added icons to the times to make it more obviously clickable
  • Added ride and request headers on the top of the schedule page, to signify what the different things were.
  • Your rides/request/offers have a slightly different look
  • Added the notes section to allow for input of additional information when offering or requesting a ride
  • Previously had the user input name and phone number on each reserve/offer/request page. Changed it to have them input it after the splash page
  • changed view from list/find to schedule view
  • combined request and offer view into one view
  • changed request from different type to just one type
  • add a my offers/request/reservations page
  • added an option to change your default name and phonenumber
  • added my rides to the splash page 
  • No labels

1 Comment

  1. Very nice work. Great organization: photo documentation & captioning; division of user comments in a table. Very nice presentation. Missing a user from round 1. Also, it would help to have +/- in each bullet for positive and negative comments, and to synthesize the comments a bit ("User was not clear what X does" instead of "Dude can I ride b*tch"), though raw quotes are also informative. The tasks were a bit confusing as well. Short is good -- try to come up with the tasks in a way that don't require the users to remember all sorts of details.