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We could figure out how to use PHP and mySQL in time, so we did. This meant that we could maintain user data on-line. This is obviously very important if the interface is actually used in real life, since a midnight exchange whose transactions are ephemeral is useless. The implementation was a little tricky, but definitely worth it.
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Evaluation
We conducted a the user test on Sunday, May 8that 8:00 PM on 11 May, 2011 at the MIT Student Center.
We looked for three users who would be representative of our target user population. Our target user population was users in the 18-30 age range who felt comfortable using computers to surf the Internet or do work. The logic behind this was that Wishdex is an online shopping tool for indexing items found while shopping online or browsing the Internet. The tool would only be useful if the user felt comfortable using a computer and online shopping sites. The users we managed to find were all fellow students who fell in this target age range.
We approached students who were already sitting in front of a computer, in the MIT Student Center computer cluster. We found two female and one male test user. Our target user population is skewed towards the female population, because we observed that female students tend to shop online more frequently. However, we built Wishdex with the hope that it would appeal to male users as well, and made sure to find at least one male test userfraternity house for which the interface is built. The target user population, brothers of the fraternity, was the same as the that of the environment in which the user tests took place. Our tasks involved putting a bid on the market for an assigned midnight; thus, only users whose usernames appeared on the schedule could be used. We added every user on the schedule to a list (no repetition), and chose three randomly. We asked them if they'd like to be part of the user test, and had a one-hundred percent success rate. The first user was a senior double majoring in math and management. We deem him an expert user, as he had extensive work in finance (internships at top-tier banks). The second user was a senior majoring in political science, and the third a sophomore majoring in 6-1. Neither had financial background, and so we deem them average users. The first user had the least trouble understanding and remembering the definitions of bid/ask.
Process
We followed the following set of steps with each test user. We made sure that the test environment was as standardized as possible.
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