Charitable Connections

Group Members

  • Emily Kuo (ekuo8)
  • Gil O'Neil (goneil)
  • Max Stein-Golenbock (msteing)

GR1 - User Observation and Analysis

GR2 - Designs

GR3 - Paper Prototyping

GR4 - Computer Prototype

GR5 - Implementation

GR6 - User Testing

GR3: Paper Prototyping

Prototype Photos

Start Screen
Event Creation (Donations Step)
Business Suggestions

Users can choose to either view their saved events or create new ones.

Users are taken through a series of steps where they select elements describing their event.  These elements are then displayed in the center pane.

This page is a slideshow of businesses that are most likely to donate to the newly created events.  From this page, a user can contact businesses to ask for donations.

Briefing

You are hosting a sports related charity event for the charity of your choice, and you are looking to connect with businesses that will donate to your event

Scenario Tasks

  1. Create a sports related event
  2. Choose two businesses you'd like donations from
  3. Contact those businesses for donations

Observations

We observed three different users testing our prototypes.  Although all users were able to successfully complete the scenario tasks, there are still areas that need to be improved.

  • Event Creation: 
    • There were issues with instructions for each step
    • All users weren't sure how many items they could choose for each step or whether they had to choose anything at all
    • User 1 skipped over Event Type
    • User 2 selected multiple charities
    • It was unclear to User 3 why Event Theme and Event Type were grouped together.
  • Business Suggestion: 
    • The Business Suggestion page was difficult to navigate
    • Users 2 and 3 weren't quite sure how the main gallery portion worked. 
    • Affordability of business pane not apparent
    • User 1 didn't know where to click to contact the business
    • No user noticed that they could click the question mark in the upper right hand corner to get help writing their message.  May be more intuitive if question mark was in the message rather than on main screen
    • Opening multiple messages at same time confusing
  • Overall: 
    • It seemed unclear why the user had to go through creating an event since event creation is not the focus of our problem. User 3 felt that there was no point creating the event if all that was being done was contacting a business
    • Users wanted to know more about how our product is helping them find businesses.  e.g. Business sorting done on the back end is not apparent to the user.
    • Users want to be able to more quickly contact businesses and not have to write a different personalized message to each company.

Prototype Iteration

Event Creation

Our second design took into account focusing on making our problem more clear. During the event creation page we chose to give the users more feedback by telling them that businesses were going to be filtered by the details they were choosing. Instead of just plopping the items on to a snapshot, they were organized better so the same details would show up in the same spot every single time. We also gave the users more instruction, telling them whether they could choose one or more than one item for each category, before they moved on.

Business Suggestion Page/Business Messaging

We tried to make the business suggestion page easier to navigate and give a users better feedback. We added in feedback for why the business showed up in the suggestions and changed the description of the businesses to make them easier to understand. On the business messaging side, we made things a little clearer on what companies were expecting in their messages. For the first message that the user wants to write there is a help message that gives the user pointers on what information to include to the business. After sending the first message, the message is saved so that it can be recalled when the user wants to contact another business. The help button is now moved into the message box so that after the first message the user can still get pointers on what to include. We also added a title to the message box so that it would be easier to tell which message went to which business if the user was composing more than one message at the same time.

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1 Comment

  1. Unknown User (jks@mit.edu)

    • Prototype: 
      • Prototype photos and explanation are lacking detail. 
      • What kinds of elements can the user select to describe their event? What does 'contacting a business' look like?
    • Briefing & scenario tasks: 
      • Good simple briefing with high-level tasks, but the scenario should be a bit more concrete.
      • Probably the most important part of your task is helping charities align with businesses based on interests/activities, so you should define the user's task: what kind of charity are they donating to? What kind of businesses would they be interested in receiving funding from?
    • User testing observations: 
      • Good usability analysis for your first design
      • Good general ideas for moving your observations into your second design iteration, but a lot of comments are: ""we made X easier to understand"" without explaining how you do it, and there's no pictures.
      • Didn't test your second design on any users