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Usability Problems

Reflection

Over the course of the iterative design process, we learned how important planning is.  While had we not been forced to follow an iterative design process, we likely would not have done nearly as much planning near the beginning of our interface, we found that implementing our final version was much easier because of all of the planning we had put in early on.  Furthermore, we learned the importance of user testing because there were things that we thought would be very intuitive, but that users sometimes couldn’t figure out.  Since we found out many of these problems early on in our paper prototype, we were able to fix them much more quickly than had we not found them until after our final implementation.  Finally, we learned the importance of testing on users that are representative of our user population.  We found that our paper-prototype testers (who were all MIT students) often wanted features that would make the application more efficient to use; however, when we tested on our actual user population (much less technically savvy), their primary concern was just being able to figure out the interface.  We did a good job of recognizing this and using our intuition to guide how we actually responded to user feedback; however, it would definitely be more ideal to use actual user feedback rather than having to rely on our intuition for how our testers differed from actual users.

If we were to repeat the process, it would be ideal to do the paper prototype testing on users who were more representative of our actual population.  We also should have done more testing where users only played the role of either admin or instructor, rather than having users switch back and forth between different types of users.  We discovered in our final testing, that we didn’t have a legend for some of our symbols in the instructor interface but that the symbols were explained in button labels in the admin interface.  The only reason that we discovered this was because one of our testers forgot what she had seen in the admin interface when acting as the instructor.  Had she not forgotten this, we might have not noticed a very important learnability problem.  To prevent this problem in the future, we would be better off having each tester only test as only one type of user so that things that they learn in part of the test would not unduly influence how they act in other parts of the test.

Overall, the iterative design process that we followed was very helpful to designing an interface that our testers loved at the end of the process, while also enabling us to implement the user interface in a timely manner.