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This user lived in China until her middle school years. She is fairly proficient in reading Chinese, but she still regularly encounters words she cannot read. Thus, she could benefit from using this application to gain exposure to and master more difficult vocabulary, and is thus part of the target user population.
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Usability Problems Identified during Testing
"Check words below" button has poor information scent
The largest usability issue we encountered was that all 3 of our users had difficulty discovering the "check words below" button in Task 2 - 2 of the first two users took a long time until they located and used it, and the third user never found it at all and gave up on the task. During our earlier tests in the paper and computer prototyping stages, however, users didn't have such difficulties locating the buttons or discovering what their functionality was. There were 2 changes that we ascribe to this regression. Firstly, because evaluators had remarked that the label "Allow all words below to be displayed in sentences" was too verbose, we had shortened the label to "Check words below". However, this label has less information scent, because the button itself doesn't say what clicking it actually does, but rather which checkboxes it manipulates; the user has to read the label on the checkboxes, "May be displayed in sentences", in order to understand what the button itself does. The second issue is that we introduced the "Sort by" buttons, again following the advice of our evaluators that items should be sortable via metrics other than just Pinyin. However, because the sort by buttons were immediately above the list of words, then they further separated the "Check words below" button from the "May appear in sentences
" checkboxes that they manipulated.
Our solution to this problem would thus be to adapt a label which has better infromation scent, and describes what clicking the button actually does (for example, "Allow all words below to be displayed in sentences", or perhaps a less verbose version of this), rather than requiring the users to figure out that the button manipulates the checkboxes, and then read the labels for the checkboxes below, before they can determine what the button actually does. We should also remove the "Sort by" buttons for the vocabulary - the buttons conflict with our goal of simplicity on the left sidebar, and they are only useful if the user already knows what word that he's searching for is, but in this case it would be more efficient for the user to simply type the word in to locate it via the incremental search functionality.
Ctrl-F is inconsistent with what browsers do
As seen with User 2 on Task 3, our interface is inconsistent with the usual browser search functionality. This is of course an artifact of our decision to implement it in Silverlight rather than HTML. Although we can't have the browser search functionality work as expected without rewriting the interface, we could intercept the Ctrl-F shortcut and have it focus the search box, as searching for words is the most likely reason why the user would press Ctrl-F on the interface.
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