...
Our testing revealed several improvements to be made to each design iteration.
...
It was also useful for finding possible avenues of expansion for this project.
First Prototype
In testing our first prototype, we discovered that part of our prototype didn't come in to play at all. Users found our home screen intuitive enough that they did not need to use the map view of their laundry room.
In the third task, our first user had a few difficulties. While she was able to find the note from the previous user of her washing machine, the affordance for replying to the note was not very clear to her. The display of "Message User" was in a box that was not implying three dimensions, so she thought that it was just instructions and she "closed" our popover, and chose choosing "Leave your own note" to reply to the user's message! We had to make the function of contacting a previous user more intuitive and immediately learnable.
All of our initial user testers asked about our use of the word "Idle" to describe some laundry machines. We had meant for this term to indicate that a machine had finished running but was still full of clothing; such a machine could be used if the user was willing to move the previous user's laundry. Some users understood this idea with thought, and others needed an explanation, but when we asked for comments this was the most frequently indicated problem. We had to pick a clearer term for this concept. Another thought that came up when we were testing this aspect was the idea that the clothes that had been waiting longer should be moved out first, and we decided to include this concept in our next design.
...
After our second round of prototyping, we discovered that our prototype did not handle some additional functions cases that would be simple to add. For example, if a person leaves a note, it is easy to contact them, but we did not handle the case where a user chooses not to leave a note but still should be contactable. We can fix this by adding "Message previous user" to the machine information panel (second picture under task 1) when there is no note that would be "from previous user".
The attempt at clarifying Idle put "Idle for 10 minutes", intending to indicate that the machine had been waiting for some length of time with clothes still in it. This was still unclear, so in the next testing phase we want to put "Finished for 10 minutes" to make it quite clear that we mean the machine has finished running. Users thought that either the machine was broken, paused, or empty when we showed them the word "Idle", so we decided to remove this altogether.
We didn't have any further problems with replying functions.
Prototype Iteration
Based on the observed interaction with task 3, we decided to change our popover to reflect a 3-D button marked "Reply" instead of "Message User," as seen in our second prototype iteration. We also changed the "Leave your own note" caption to "Leave instructions," which is less likely to be confused for replying functionality.
...