GR3

Prototype Photos

Briefing

Hello! Thank you for helping us with user testing for our new program, HManager! HManager is an application designed to help dorm managers organize their day-to-day workload and communicate effectively with the residents of their building. In this scenario, you are a new house manager for the dorm Dartmoor, and you are eager to try to make your life easy by using HManager to organize your life. To help us evaluate how good our first design is, you will do four tasks. Please remember that your intellect is not being tested; our design is. If you find anything difficult to do, it's because we messed up. Please have fun, and we hope you will find this application fun and rewarding to use.  Also, this is a web page, not a touchscreen application.  Please leave your finger on the page as much as possible to show where your mouse is.  Also, please feel free to think out loud so we know where you are confused. 

The HManager Team.

Scenario Tasks

You are the new house manager of the dorm Dartmoor.  You are taking over from Greg, who was not very organized.  You want to keep organized, and so decide to use HManager.  

Task 1: Make the student request on floor 3 with a description of "flooded hallway" into a project.

Task 2: Update the status of the project with description of "new furniture" to completed.

Task 3: Add new project that costs $500.00 with a start date of Monday and estimated completion date 4/1/2012.

Task 4: Check building status and budget.

Play around and see what happens.

Observations

Round 1

We observed a few problems during the first round of user testing. A few users had trouble figuring out that the “exit” button in the top right corner closed the update dialog instead of the “Update Project” button. Otherwise, updating projects generally did not pose a problem. Some users had trouble understanding the graphic representing budget allocations over the year in budget view; for example, they couldn’t tell how much was allocated vs. how much was unallocated. The building status view, which showed all of the active projects by floor, also confused some of our users because they couldn’t understand how to manage multiple-floor projects, though they liked being able to have an overview of active projects. There was also an issue in the “Create New Project” dialog, where some users weren’t sure whether they should enter in a floor or not. In that same dialog, they entered dollar amounts in different ways: some included the dollar sign while others didn’t. On the plus side, no one had any trouble figuring out how to review or take action on student requests.

Round 2

During the second round of user testing, users had much less problems navigating their tasks. The building status page was still a bit confusing because of the layout of projects, but once we fixed that, it was very effective. One major point of confusion was that the “View” button on the “View Project” dialog brought up the budget graphic, and that was unexpected. So a more descriptive button description was necessary. 

Prototype Iteration

Based on user feedback during Round 1, we changed the “Recent Expenditures” section from a static pane that would require going to another page to view the desired information to a scroll pane. We also changed how we handled a special case for multiple floor projects, in which a project might be on floors 2 & 4 but not three, for example, by drawing lines connecting project bubbles on different floors. We changed the update dialog so that it closed when the “Update Project” button was clicked, and changed the “Create New Project“ dialog so that if no floor is entered, then a project will apply to the entire building.