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A friend's birthday is coming up and you just bought a card for everyone to sign. Problem is not everyone is around and/or are too busy to stop by your room to write a message on the card. Luckily for you, you can use Eloha to create e-cards for whatever occasion and collect that special collage of messages from friends in all geographic locations.
Scenario Tasks
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- Creator, Steve Jobs, creates a birthday card for his precious daughter, Jeanette, on Eloha and sends out invitation to Tina Hu, Joseph Tsieh, John Liu and other family friends to sign. Her birthday is July 5.
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- Friend, John Liu, receives the invite link to go on and sign the ecard to Jeanette. He writes “Happy Birthday” but saves before finishing his message.
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- A day later, John comes back and finishes his message with “wish you the happiest day ever!” before saving his message for good.
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- The creator, Steve Jobs, logs back on to the page after a week, 2 days before Jeanette’s birthday, changes the style to something else, deletes a spam message from “DFJLH” and marks the card ready for submission on Jeanette’s birthday.
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- After having a nightmare about Jesse Liu writing something nasty on the ecard to his daughter, Steve Jobs revisits the card the night before her birthday and reads over Jesse Liu’s message to Jeanette before finally hitting submit and going back to sleep.
Observations
Wednesday:
User #1
We gave our first test user task #1 - to create a card. He tried to create an account from the home page (fig. 1) before creating a card but changed his mind halfway through and went back to the homepage to create a new card for Jeanette. He had trouble figuring out the “Name” field for the recipient form (fig. 3). After much hesitation, he typed in his own name instead of Jeanette’s name. Then, when it came to emailing the edit-card-link to friends (fig. 5), he was surprised that the “email” link opened up his mail client instead of his gmail. Immediately afterwards, he realized that he had typed Jeanette’s name as “Jeanete” and looked everywhere for an admin page to correct the mistake (There wasn’t an admin’s page).
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User #3
Finally, we gave our third test user task #2 of signing the card. He clicked on the invite link correctly and started typing his message. However, once halfway done with his message, he hit “save” instead of “write” and didn’t know how to view his message again once he clicked on another person’s name. He also complained about not being able to see a list of other people signing the same card. Towards the end, when it came time to create an account (fig. 8) so he can sign back in to finish his half-finished message, he gave up out of frustration and closed the whole page. He complained that he had to create an user account just so he can type in two sentences for birthday card. He preferred to have just called up Jeanette and wished her happy birthday over the phone.
Friday:
User #1
Our first test user was confused about the save and send button, and wasn’t sure what they did so he hit the save button “save” instead of the write button“write”. (Fig. 13) He Also, he wasn’t sure whether the message was automatically saved. We also Then, we noticed that we should have should’ve had some sort of error checking before the user is done writing the message into the card and clicking the send button so he can catch any blatant mistakes he made. The Birthday only needs to have a month and day, no year required. (Fig. 11) And Finally, we noticed the order in which we presented the link that the user could use to send to his friends came too early on in the creation process. (Fig. 16)This caused the user to forget about the link when he was done writing his message of the card.
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User #2
User #2 clicked on save button as opposed to write when he wasn’t supposed to save the work that he had. (Fig. 14) We noticed the buttons were very confusing for our user, which could be caused by the fact that there were too many clutter of buttons on the UI. We felt this user did not have an intuition of what was going on during the card creation process. He also felt unsure about the collaborator’s list and why it existed. (Fig. 15) There was also no scroll bar on this list for the user to check on other users. Like the first user, this user was also confused about the link for friends and the admin link. And finally he had trouble figuring out how to edit messages, and figured out that he had to click on the tag cloud to bring up write/edit options underneath after some hints from the facilitator.
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.)
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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.
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