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Thank you for participating in this user study. LocaShare is an application that allows you to share your location data in ways that are different from existing services like Foursquare and Latitude. It gives you an ability to set preferences on what type of location information friends and companies can view about you. Also, you can have a look at your information that those entities (companies/friends) can see about you. |
Tasks:
We are now going to
*Task 1: *View Bob’s information (current location and historical location)
*Task 2: *View the information that Bob can see about you and edit the time period when he can view you.
*Task 3: *Add John as a new friend of yours.
*Task 4: *View offers and select the 5% discount that Star Market is offering.
Observations:
User | View Bob's information | View what information Bob can see about you and edit the time period when he can view you. | Add John as a new friend | View offers and select the 5% discount that Star Market is offering. | Suggestions |
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#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?
4. Unclear wording: What does "MTWTFSS" mean?
‧ 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.
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#3 | ‧ Learnability 1. Different mental model: The two charts seem to convey similar information.
| ‧ 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.
4.Inconsistency: The charts seem to be a different kind of setting from "when" and "what." It would be better to use another screen for setting the charts.
5. No immediate feedback: User asked after I set these settings, what would happen?
‧ 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.
| 1. User asked “am I adding Star Market as one of my friends?”
2. User 3 asked if the "deals functionality" could be turned into a social experience ("I would like to share my deals with Bob"). |
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