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Unfortunately, one problem of the paper prototype is that it is not a computer. The user may not apply the same intuition as he would if he were using a computer application with the same mechanics. Therefore, we were not too picky with the details of running the prototype. If the user seems to be performing the right interaction, we let it pass. We did not expect users to be very accurate with their finger pointers, for example, in dragging in the exact position of the card. Most of the users ended up just saying general things like "I will drag this card into the middle."
Summary of Interactions
With cards on main table
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- Shuffle the deck of cards.
- Deal deck of cards evenly to 4 players. Every player should end up with 13 cards.
- Play cards from your hand onto the table (as instructed by the facilitator).## First, player one card that the facilitator picks.
- Second, play a group of cards that the facilitator picks (for example, all the hearts in your hand).
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We made three major modifications to the second iteration.
Modification 1) Pop-up Menu
- Right click on selected cards produces pop-up menu of options.
- Menu options include Flip card, Shuffle, Deal Evenly, and Give to Player X
Modification 2) Simpler group selection of multiple cards in a stack
- Left click on card in middle of stack inclusively selects all cards above.
- This also removes the functionality of selecting an arbitrary card from the middle of a stack. We figured this is not a common task in playing cards.
Modification 3) Quick play of cards in hand
- Double click on “down” card in your hand immediately plays that card onto the table, to a position just in front of you.
- Double click on “up” card plays all “up” cards onto the table.
Version 2 Testing
Photos
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- Users D, E, F all selected entire deck using double click after at most 2 tries
- Users D, E, F all efficiently dealt cards without error after performing shuffling task
- Users D, E, F all played single desired card from hand after at most 2 tries (either discovering dragging or double clicking)
- User F mentioned that "people don't like dragging." We found this somewhat surprising. Maybe it's because it's the paper prototype, and dragging feels a little strange to do with your finger on a piece of paper. Nonetheless, we will consider providing alternatives to interactions so that drag based interactions are not as cumbersome.
Usability Analysis
Visibility
- menu displays all available options (even ones that are greyed out)
- there is no indication that right clicking produces a menu, this just has to be discovered
Learnability
- right click during shuffling task revealed dealing option for use during later dealing task
- User E specifically mentioned that all interactions were “straightforward”
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- many errors related to multiple card selection were avoided by using pop-up menu
- error recovery was easily learned and it seems that people will not experience much frustration with fixing errors
Conclusion
In our first iteration we tried to produce a highly intuitive look and feel by having the cards behave similar to icons of their own. Multiple cards are selected by dragging a box surrounding them or double clicking. We figured this would be familiar for users because many other computer applications use this kind of selection mechanic. Cards are moved between stacks by dragging and dropping, just like icons on your desktop or files in a file manager.
In our second iteration we took the observations from our first iteration and got rid of some of the less frequently used input options. Instead, we decided to make a right click menu contain the common tasks. Shuffling and dealing are more or less "one-time" actions, in that they are generally performed only once per round. This means that putting them away in a menu should not hinder the look and feel of the interface too much. The game itself will still feel just as natural.