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We would increase the information scent because some users pointed out and we also observed that users did not understand the capabilities of the board and various modes of interaction possible. Interestingly, a user pointed this out during the paper prototype and we decided then to show a demo video whenever the board is idle and in standby mode. However, on further consideration we dropped the idea because having a standby mode would be a trade off between giving the posters maximum visibility time and the previous aim of educating new users. We now think that a more appropriate approach would be to display tooltip like messages that would point out interesting features of the board. That idea too has to be carefully implemented because it has a high propensity to become a nuisance for experienced users and unlike system possessing authentication, we cannot selectively turn it off or on per user. If we implemented a personalized board as initially envisioned, we could reduce the nuisance-capacity somewhat.
A user pointed out that an efficient way to add items to the calendar would also be to drag the thumbnails of the posters of interest into a virtual calendar at the bottom of the screen.
Despite the fact that a focused poster can be dismissed by clicking outside the poster, most of our users consistently dismissed it with the 'x' at the top right corner. This 'x' was small and hence poster dismissal proved to be somewhat difficult. It would be necessary to increase the size of this element.
When selecting a poster from the file system, a user first changed the view mode (of Window Explorer) away from 'Detail View' to 'Tile View' so he could preview the images before selecting them. This was a gentle reminder that a mode that allows previewing in the file explorer should be set by default.
For some reason, most users when trying to scribble clicked on the color picker first regardless of whether they needed to select a new color. This indicates that the users were not aware that scribbling could be done immediately after focusing and some means to increase the visibility of the mode may be needed here.
The idea of swiping a card for identity seemed confusing to some users. In particular, a non-native English speaker mostly ignored all written instructions (including those for swiping cards) indicating that in a diverse environment such as MIT's we may need to cut down on textual information.
One of the users was confused about which view was currently selected indicating that our efforts to distinguish the selected view (in response to our heuristic evaluations) may not have been sufficient.
A user had difficulty finding an added poster because she temporarily forgot the date she added it to and this is a scenario that we will probably need to deal with in practice. First of all, there needs to be some feedback indicating that the add operation was successful (in response to another user's comments) and this feedback should provide a way to optionally let the user view the added poster in its right place in the application.
One user assumed at first that the color picker was for changing the background color of a poster we therefore need to make its purpose (changing the scribble color) more obvious.
One user did not save after scribbling (although, another user did so thoughtlessly). For safety reasons, we may want to remind users to save their scribbling or continuously save it in the background.
Implementation
We implemented the project using a SmartBoard optical touchscreen that plugged into any computer's serial/USB ports for input and VGA port for output. The backend was implemented using Python using the Django web application framework and SQLite database. We also wrote a standalone websockets server for feeding the inputs from the RFID card reader to the frontend. The frontend was implemented using HTML, CSS and Javascript with a heavy reliance on the JQuery and JQuery UI libraries as well as a few other libraries.