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None of the users we tested this design with had any major issues with the design of the notes taking / photo taking / photo insertion interfaces. One user took a photo, but did not drag it out of the camera roll into his notes without further prompting from us. Users agreed that the camera button was redundant after the first click of it, which presented users with a QR code to download our app. Our design stated that after that point, the button would remotely launch the app on the user's phone. However, users agreed that while the remote launching was clear in paper prototyping when we were handing them paper phones, it wouldn't be obvious in the real world when the phone is in a user's pocket.
Smartphone Drawing User Observations
Due to time constraints, we didn't test this design on as many users as our other designs. However, several usability issues did crop up.
The draw on the phone / view on the phone and the laptop way we had of handling diagram creation proved confusing. The user didn't realize at first that the paper she was taking notes on represented a text area, and tried to diagram with the pencil that represented the keyboard. This could have been made more confusing by the fact that we only had one whiteboard marker, so we could not simulate the drawing appearing on the laptop as the user draws it on the phone screen.
The user also found the sidebar document management system confusing. This again could be because of deficiencies in our simulation: in an effort to increase the speed of our prototype, the person running the sidebar failed to properly order and indent all of the category/notes entries in the sidebar.
Prototype Iteration
Based on the fact that our webcam design got the most enthusiastic response from our first round of users (enthusiasm for the concept, rather than better usability than the other designs), as well as the fact that in our opinion that design has more opportunities for UI innovation, we only iterated on the webcam design.
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