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User

View Bob's information

View what information Bob can see about you

Add John as a new friend

View offers and select one

Suggestions

#1

N/A

‧ Learnability:
1. Different mental model: She attempted
to click on her own profile picture to view
 how Bob could see about him rather than
 clicking on Bob’s page and choose
“My LocaShare”. The user expressed
that since it is how others view my information,
it should be shown in my page instead of others
page.

2. Affordance mismatch: A profile picture has
the affordance to be clickable; however,
our design does not support this function.

3. Misleading arrows/bad affordance: She
was confused by “< My LocaShare” button
and “> Bob’s LocaShare” button. The
direction of the arrows is hard to understand,
the text on the button does not help user to
make the decision as well. Also, the texture
of the button does not make the user feel like
it is a clickable button.

4. Unclear affordance: An empty map in the
editing page makes user think it is a text
box and want to type something in it.

Visibility:
1. User was unable to know the edits were
only applied to a specific friend.

‧ Learnability:
1. Different conceptual model:
User was unable to find the
search bar for adding a
friend since clicking on
“My Friends” does not
make sense ("John is not my
friend at this point").

‧ Learnability:
1. Affordance: User tried clicking
on the box to the left of "Star
Market" as it looks more like
a button than an icon.

User wondered if
it was possible to
create
user-specific
categories.
Also, how to
select multiple
offers at once.

#2

 N/A

‧ Learnability
1. Different mental model: It is more
natural to name the user as “Me”
instead of “Joe”.

2. Inconsistency/different mental
model: We noticed that user habitually
assumed that the picture on the
upper left corner should be me rather
than my friend. Putting user’s profile
picture on the upper right corner is
externally inconsistent with other
social apps.

3. Lack of feedback: The map does not
provide enough feedback about the
coverage of a location. A circle
(with different radius) below the bubble
would help solve this problem. Also,
user was puzzled about what would
happen to the coverage of a location
after choosing “city” or “state”, would
the radius of a location change as well?

 ‧ Efficiency
1. Aggregation: User suggested that the
application should be able to support a
function to hide/show all the charts,
instead of clicking on each chart one
by one in order to hide/show it.

‧  Learnability
1. Different mental model: User
was unable navigate from the
home screen for the “Add John”
task since the user is expecting
an “Add friend +” button on the
home screen. User did not
expect to click on “My friends”
to add a new friend.

2. Lack of feedback:
User was expecting some
feedback would be provided
after adding John, things like
a successful or failure alert.

‧ Learnability
1. Different mental model: User
expected that upon clicking on
the little arrow below “0.4 mi”,
the map/direction to Star
Market would be provided
(since it was directly below
the distance).

2. Affordance: User tried to
click on the "Star" symbol to
see the offers but it was an
icon instead of a button.

‧ Visibility
1. User asked if the user was
not interested in utilizing any
offers right now, is it possible
to provide a way to hide it and
click on "My Deals" to view it
at a later point in time.

 

#3

 N/A

‧ Learnability
1. Different mental model: User attempted
 to click on his own profile picture to view
 how Bob could see about him rather
 than clicking on Bob’s page and choose
 “My LocaShare”. (Similar thing
 happened to user 1.)

2. Inconsistency: User asked why my profile
 picture shows up when viewing Bob’s
 information. It is externally inconsistent with
 other social apps because they would not
 show your pictures when viewing others page. 

3. Inconsistency: User might expect to have a 
profile page which can be accessible by clicking
on his/her own profile picture just like other
social apps.

‧ Efficiency
1. Aggregation: User asked “If I want to hide
my daily/weekly and monthly stats, do I have
to click "Hide" 3 times?”

‧ Visibiltiy
1. The search bar under the map is not salient.

2. The "neighborhood/city/state" did not
convey the look of radio buttons to the user.

‧ Learnability
1. Inconsistency: User found
the way to add a new friend is
externally inconsistent with the
way to add a new contact on
a mobile phone. On a mobile
phone (contact list), when you
want to add users, you “add”
them instead of “searching”
for them.

2. Unclear affordance: User
attempted to add a friend by
clicking on the “empty box” in
“friends near you”, since it is
intuitive to fill in an empty box
by adding something in it.

‧ Learnability
1. Jargon: The user mentioned
that “Select” sounded rather
ambiguous.

User asked “am I
adding Star
Market as one
of my friends?”

https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/6DOT813sp12/LocaShare-PaperPrototypingNote

https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/6DOT813sp12/LocaShare-PaperPrototypingNote

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Paper-prototyping

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notes

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Findings:

  1. Paper-prototyping still has its constraints. It is very hard to create a button by using papers, even if we tried to use paper and transparency together and colored it with red, it is still not obvious for users, since the texture is similar to paper.
  2. Another limitation is that it is hard to tell whether a picture is clickable or not. In a computer, when users hover a clickable item, the mouse icon would change, but it is hard to create this effect in paper-prototyping.
  3. The other limitation is due to time constraint. One user would only spend 15 mins finishing all the tasks; therefore, they would not think very clearly about the UI design or the functionality of the application, but just follow their instinct. Therefore, new designs would hard to be noticed or appreciated since they are externally different from existing applications. We solve this problem by finding users outside of the class to test our second design, and had an one-hour interview with each of the user. 
  4. Our design is challenging in the sense that we want to make the option "how others view me" obvious and salient; however, this change might cause external inconsistency with other existing apps, since currently, they are not making this functionality easily accessible to users. (For example, in facebook, you need to click on a tiny widget icon in your profile page and click "View as". But the icon in nearly invisible and the word "View as" carries bad information scent.)

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