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- The first task description, "Read something interesting", initially confused some users who didn't realize they were being asked to try to scroll down or expand items. Changing the description to "Find something interesting to read" resolved this.
- Because it is a mobile app we tried to afford scrolling by displaying a partial line of content at the bottom edge, but some users did not realize that the page was meant to be scrollable.
- Users were able to notice the "Expand" button and click on it to expand items to see the full version. In some of the original tests, we didn't display a "Shrink" button on expanded items; during these tests users tried to touch outside the image to get back, similar to how you close a photo on Facebook. Some users did this even after we started showing the "Shrink" button - we could consider making clicking outside of an expanded item shrink it, though this could be another issue that comes up with a paper prototype.
- A couple of users hit the "Share" button, which took them to the canonical URL of the item (its imgur page, the e-mail in the Gmail interface, the post on Facebook, etc). Ideally, we could choose a reasonable default mode of sharing so that the user wouldn't have to take further action. There is always the possibility that the user wants to share between services or out-of-band, though.
- Some users thought the interface was busy and suggested hiding buttons. When the interface is on a real screen we can better determine whether the blow to learnability makes sense.
- For the most part, users were familiar with interfaces that present a list of items to read, and did not encounter significant roadblocks.
Saving
- We
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- have two mechanisms to save content for later
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- . The first is to hit a "Read Later" button that
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- causes items to show up again in a later session. The second is a set of tags that users can apply to items, and later search for, similar to Gmail. One user mentioned that she would save emails often since she doesn't want to reply to them on the phone, and suggested that hitting "Read Later" on an email mark it as unread
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- , which would be desirable
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- to users who use both Hubbub and their email clients to read emails
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- .
- When the user hit "Read Later"
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- we changed that button's caption to "Saved". Some users thought that
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- "Saved" didn't fit their mental model (emails are already "saved")
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- and suggested
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- removing the item from the list. We might go a step further and make the gesture for reading later be swiping the item off the screen
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- ,
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- similar to dismissing notifications on Android.
- Tagging went smoothly for most users. They realized that they should check the tags they want and then hit "Save"
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- to save or "Cancel" to abort.
- We didn't ask users to create new tags, but they did recognize that there was a textbox at the top
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- and one user created a tag anyway. That user did not realize that they had to press the "New Tag" button
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- for their tag to be created.
- One user
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- noted that it wasn't clear how
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- to rename a tag. It is, in fact, impossible with the current interface, something we may need to fix.
Filtering
Several users took more time with filtering than they did with other tasks, partly because the task itself is more complex. The interface also went through the most changes in the iteration step. In the initial design, users got to the filtering interface by switching tabs at the top, but most users were confused and took longer than we would have liked to find it. When we replaced it with a button, responses were much faster. Some users didn't immediately understand what the advanced filter options referred to - partly because on paper the "Advanced Filter" link didn't show enough affordances to appear clickable and there was text underneath it (we were trying to depict a slide-down menu that inserts its contents between always-visible content). Since the hyperlinks aspect of the filter was in the advanced section, users needed more time to follow it. Some users tried to simulate it by typing text into the search bar. Some users asked for ways to preview the filter, or possibly show filter options along with items in the reading interface. Before the first iteration, users were confused about how to execute or save the filter; the iteration made the buttons more prominent and after that users found them faster.
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