DogPack - GR3 Paper Prototyping

Table of Contents

Briefing

This application is intended to find and schedule meetups with other dogs in your locality. For this scenario, you may assume:

• You have already created a profile for your dog.
• You are currently logged into the website.

Scenario Tasks

Task 1 : Respond to the invitation from 'Lassy'

Task 2 : Search for dogs in your locality, and schedule a meetup with 'Cupcake'

Task 3 : Review a previous meetup with 'Allen'

First Prototype Iteration

Prototype Photos: First Iteration

1. Home 

2. Search

4. Profile

5. Schedule

6.  Invitation Response

7. Review Page

8. Meet-Up

Observations: First Iteration

Home Page
- There was a learnability issue with the "History" section since the intended use was not clear to the users. Users took
  time to understand that this section could be used to review previous meetups. One user clicked on the "History"
  title expecting to see all past meetups.
- Users suggested that your own dog's Profile Information need not be displayed at the top of the home page.

Search Page
- Search bar placeholder shouldn't only show an address. Two users felt that this they were expected to enter a complete
  address conforming to the placeholder rather than a general location.
- Multiple users suggested that the Search bar should have auto-complete capability for better efficiency

Schedule Page
- There were multiple learnability issues with this page. Multiple users struggled to use this page to schedule meet-ups,
  warranting a rework of this page.
- It was unclear as to which dog's schedule was being shown in the calendar.
- Having the Date and Time fields on the same page, but having auto-populate capability (by clicking on calendar) for only
  the date field and manual input for the time field confused the users due to inconsistency.
- The current day was not indicated on the calendar, further hindering the users while selecting a date for the meet-up.
- Users suggested having an auto-complete option for the location (based on previous entries / popular locations) along
  with an option for a pop-up with a map-view.

Profile
- There was a concern regarding negative reviews being shown on the profile page of a dog. One user was not comfortable
  having their name showing up along with a negative comment they posted for a particular.
- Additionally there was suggestion to show a simple rating which would be easier to compare dogs rather than having to
  read all the comments in the page to judge if the dog was a suitable match for their own dog.

Studio Feedback
- Calendar in Schedule Meetup still seems a little unclear (not sure what the "red" color represents).
- Option to display the Dog's Rating in the Invitation Response page.
- The Home Page can be better organized using Accordion style representations.

Second Prototype Iteration

Prototype Photos: Second Iteration

1. Home Page

- Restructured the page to make Upcoming events more prominent
- Profile information was removed
- Renamed "History" to "Previous" for better understanding.
- Affordance to directly rate entries in the Previous meet-ups sections was added, thus improving the
  efficiency by avoiding having to switch pages to review.

2. Search Page

- The placeholder in the search bar was updated to support exact and similar locations along with auto
  complete capability for more efficiency.

3. Schedule Page

- The calendar widget was updated to highlight busy (red) time slots in the schedules of both the participants.
- Calendar widget now shows week view along with time slots for each day. Selecting a time slot auto populates
  both the date and time fields.
- Location Field updated to have auto-complete capability and a pop-up for a map view.
- Current date highlighted in the calendar

4. Profile

- Negative comments are displayed anonymously
- A simple Overall Rating is displayed for better usability.

Observations: Second Iteration

Home Page
- All three users suggested to remove the calendar and just keeping the list of upcoming meet-ups since it was confusing,
  while one suggested having a tab to toggle between list view and calendar
- There was a learnability issue with the buttons on the list of upcoming events. Users weren't sure whether the button
  would lead to the schedule page or the profile page
- One user suggested pushing the upcoming events to the top of the page since it seemed to be the most relevant section.
- One user wanted to view more events displayed in the Previous Section (currently only the last 2 meetups were displayed).

Invitation Response
- Two users selected the "Suggest a new time" option in the Invitation Response task. This lead to the schedule page
  (originally designed for Schedule Meetup task) and had to switch back and forth to see the originally scheduled time.

Schedule Page
- The red slots (intended to represent "busy" time slots) was unclear to users. One expected this to be the available time slot.
- The map pop-up capability was not obvious to users, warranting better affordance.
- One user suggested to have each day have the corresponding date displayed rather than a general date range for the week.

Meet-up
- It wasn't clear as to which dogs were listed in this section. All dogs in the network OR all dogs in the locality?

Miscellaneous Suggestions
- Advanced Filtering capabilities in Search page to narrow results based on breed, gender, weight.
- One user suggested the ability to view multiple dog profiles/information while viewing results, as this would be useful in
  selecting a dog to schedule a meetup with.
- It was also suggested to be able to see "recent activities" of dogs.
- Support for inter-connectivity with existing Social Networks

Future Changes

We plan to make the below changes in the next round of Software Iterations:
- Update the Home Page to push up the Upcoming meet-ups sections and organize it in a more intuitive manner
- Add better affordances to the calendar widget in the Schedule page.
- Improve the affordance for the map pop-up button.
- Add Rating to the Invitation Response page.
- Organize the Meet-up page to indicate that the listed dogs were ones that were previously met-up with.
- Add capability to cancel meet-ups (Something that no user brought up in both rounds of testing!)