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Describe the internals of your implementation, but keep the discussion on a high level. Discuss important design decisions you made in the implementation. Also discuss how implementation problems may have affected the usability of your interface.

Evaluation

Describe how you conducted your user test. Describe how you found your users and how representative they are of your target user population (but don't identify your users by name). Describe how the users were briefed and what tasks they performed; if you did a demo for them as part of your briefing, justify that decision. List the usability problems you found, and discuss how you might solve them.The user test was conducted on a laptop with the user in control and the facilitator and observer behind the user on either side. Our users were all MIT students who had no previous experience contacting policy makers. While perhaps more technicaly inclined than other users in our proposed population, these test subjects still had the esential trait we were looking for: a lack of experience contacting policymakers.

Because our project mission did not change from when we did our paper prototype testing, we used the same briefing. The briefing is reproduced below:

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We did not use a demo because we preferred to let the user learn the interface themselves. Our users were all MIT students who had no previous experience contacting policy makers. 

Usability problems and severity

User 1

• The phone number entry field was not auto-focused on the call now page (mild)
  • Make the field auto-focus on page load
• The user was confused about what happened after the call was placed on the call now page (moderate)
  • The user did not have her phone with her, so she was not alerted by it ringing as would normally be the case
• The voicemail record button has a microphone icon while external consistency calls for a red circle (cosmetic)
  • Change the icon to a red circle
• The now button on the time entry widget confused the user because she had already entered a future date, and now does not make sense in that regard (mild)
  • Remove the now button when the date is not set to today
• The time entry widget is not intuitively mapped (mild)
  • Use a more intutive time selector widget
• The header buttons are not obviously buttons (cosmetic)
  • Change the background color and edges of the header hrefs to be more button like

User 2

User 3

Reflection

The iterative design process was useful, because it allowed us to make changes rapidly and then get feedback to double check that we had actually made an improvement with that change. If we were to do this again, we would probably investigate which technologies to use more carefully. For all of us this was our first time using css, javascript, or php, and while we got the work done, we had to spend more time learning the technology than we would have liked. However, now that we know the technology better, it would be useful to run more high fidelity tests, because we believe the feedback from testing phases that actually involved a computer (heuristic evaluation and final user testing) to be the most valuable and actionable. For example, even though our paper prototype had radio buttons on the filter tab, none of our test subjects commented on them, and this was likely due to the low fidelity of paper. Again, web prototyping is so quick, that we think it might have been more useful to test a wire-frame prototype a little earlier on.