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We have not had the time to make any fancy graphics, or anything involving animation, so some cool ideas we have of improving visibility have not been implemented. For example, we want to have an animation for shuffling to alert users that a stack has just been shuffled, but cannot think of an easy way to make such an animation.

Reflection

Harrison's reflection

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Evaluation

Users
We chose users by asking friends who we played cards with regularly. They were a good representation of our target audience because these are technology-savvy college students who enjoy card games.

Briefing
We briefed our users by presenting them with the following scenario.
“Imagine that you and your friends have decided to play bridge using our application. You are
the dealer and so you have been tasked with shuffling and dealing the cards to all players. Afterwards, you will be asked to perform other types of playing actions, simulating as if you were in the middle of an actual game.”

No demo was used during our briefing.

Tasks
Stage 1: Dealing

• flip over deck
• shuffle
• deal 13 cards to each player
• take 13 into own hand

Stage 2: Playing

• play any 5 card poker hand
• reveal all cards in hand visibly (as if you were the dummy player)

Observations and fixes
1. No visible feedback for shuffle function when deck is flipped
Possible fix: Display a notification pop-up alerting the user that the cards have been shuffled. Alternatively, use an indicator icon to identify randomly shuffled stacks.
2. Hard to select a sub-stack using the trackpad
Observation: Because a trackpad offers less precision than a mouse, having the mouse pointer land on the exact pixel required to select the desired size sub-stack took many attempts.
Possible fix: Encourage users to use a mouse. Alternatively, decrease the mouse speed as it hovers over cards to give users more precision and control.
3. Tedious to play all cards from hand
Observation: Currently, all cards in the hand must be individually clicked once and then dragged onto the table.
Possible fix: Use a selection box that when encompasses the entire hand will select all of the cards in the hand.
4. Right click pop-up menu options not obvious
Observation: Majority of users did not think to use the right click button unless prompted.
Possible fix: Include help menu that makes users aware of this option.
5. No undo or restart game option
Observation: When users accidentally dragged the entire deck into own hand, it was more convenient to restart the application to reset the deck.
Possible fix: Implement a undo function or see possible fix for 3.

Reflection

Haitao's reflection

I felt that most of the feedback received through doing user tests matched my expectations of what the feedback would be. I guess the biggest disparity was that some people were not as familiar with some shortcuts and affordances which I thought would be effective. For instance, the type of click that people think to do did not match my expectations. It seems that people do not really think to try different types of clicks, preferring to just single left click on everything. However, this instance is meant to be used by people who want to play cards, and so we assume they have already tried other interfaces in the past and are familiar with the standard set of interactions in these online card game rule-based interfaces. The users that we tested on were not necessarily in this user class, so that may have caused some unexpected results.

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