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Usability problems are summarized below, along with possible solutions:
- Some users did not see the popup displaying a landmark's name, but they knew what it was due to their familiarity with MIT. This may be solved if users were not familiar with MIT, because when users searched for the name of the landmark they were able to find it.
- All three users attempted to click on a landmark and suggested that clicking on a landmark when following a tour would pop up more information about it. We planned to add Yelp integration in our app, but found it outside the scope of our interface design.
- Two of three users wanted information to automatically pop up when you approached a landmark. Right now, the landmark is being highlighted as you approach it, so an info popup would be an easy extension.
- Two of three users could not determine how to re-order landmarks when creating a tour. All three of them first attempted to do it by dragging the landmark from its center, instead of on the left (where the draggable affordance existed). Two ways of solving this problem would be to make the entire landmark draggable, or to make the draggable affordance more obvious. One user did see the dots and assumed that meant it was draggable ("otherwise why would there be dots?").
- When searching for landmarks, half of the screen was taken up by the keyboard and the other half was divided into half map and half list. Both of the two users who attempted to search by name found this interface to be much too small to interact with. When the keyboard is open, we should probably hide the list view so that a larger map view is visible.
- When you search for a landmark that is already on-screen, it is not obvious that anything happens when the map relocates slightly. A popup that says "Found x results" or similar could be useful.
- One user was overwhelmed with the initial map view, because there were many landmarks. This could be solved by clustering landmarks together until the user zoomed in to an appropriate zoom level.
Reflections
Designing a product is highly challenging and may be the most difficult task our group has ever faced together. We all had unique visions for our final product and merging those visions together with the other constraints of real life, such as time, was difficult and taught us all some valuable lessons.
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