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(For the third user test, we asked the users to perform the instructor's tasks 1 and 3, and one of us did the admin's tasks 2 and 4.)

Usability Problems

• CATASTROPHIC problem:  Instructors have no idea what the red E and the blue A mean unless they have seen the admin interface.
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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.

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