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User #3
The third user seemed to get everything that we wanted to happen and understood what was going on from the start of the card creation to the end of sending it out to friends.
Prototype iteration
(You did two rounds of paper prototyping. Describe how your prototype changed between those two rounds.)
- Removed user accounts (no more sign up, admin page, sign in)
- Added the collaborator list
- Merged message and card page
- Improved edit/choose style dialog
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We received really strong complaints about having to create user accounts from the first iteration and decided to do away with user accounts completely in the next iteration - substituting “edit links” and “admin link” to replace the role of user accounts (fig. 16). This way, users had disposable unique URL links to their edit pages and could have a card up and running within minutes without the hassle of signing up a new account.
Also, from user #2 and #3’s suggestions, we added a “collaborators” list on the right of the edit page (fig. 14) with list of names as links to contributor’s messages in the card. This helped, to our surprise, our test user in the second iteration when he had to find the “DFJLH” nonsense message to delete. We expected him to hunt down the name from the tag cloud but he chose to use the collaborator’s list to nail down the target within seconds.
In our first iteration, all participants had to write their messages on a separate page from the card’s viewing page (which had to be sent out). (See fig. 3 for an example as the administrator).There was a lack of instant feedback. In our second iteration, we decided to merge the two tasks of writing a message and viewing that message and others on the card onto one page (see fig. 13). When the user enters a message and writes it into a card, the message is immediately put into the preview pane above the message form. There is instant feedback on where the message (in this case, where the name of the user who wrote the message) goes which is valuable to the user. Additionally, it also displays who the other participants are and where their messages are in relation to the current user’s. In the same vein, we improved our choose/edit styles page in the second iteration so users can also see live feedback of their choice right underneath and see how it all fits in with the existing messages in semi-full-page-mode before settling on a choice.