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Each file is a model, responsible for one of the mySQL tables. Each model receives and action attribute, and some extra attributes if needed and returns a jSON of the results, which the jQuery parses and presents to the user.
Evaluation
We conducted all of our user tests in a similar way to how we did our paper prototyping user tests. We gave each the same briefing and the same tasks that we used previously, and added an archives task. We chose not to use a demo because we felt like our tasks and interface were simple enough to not need them, and we were able to gain information about a user’s first impression.
Initially, our group planned to conduct user tests on three daycare workers in the TCC located in the Stata Center. Unfortunately, although the daycare gave us positive feedback about the idea, only one worker volunteered, and we have been unable to schedule something with him. However, were able to find two nannies and a babysitter.
Our first nanny was very helpful in her feedback . She is a 31-year old mom and current nanny of 3 year old girls. She described herself as pretty comfortable with computers, but not ‘techy’. She mentioned that she often tries and is sometimes unsuccessful to give the girl’s parents a better idea of what goes on in her household daycare. Although she is not a worker at a larger daycare, she is very typical of our target population. She gave us useful suggestions regarding both the usability and usefulness of our website. For example, she mentioned that the ‘energy’ of a child is hard to quantify. She said “energy and mood changes so much throughout the day for a young child that it might be useful to break up into time-frames, such as ‘pre nap’, ‘post nap’ and ‘post lunch’.” She also mentioned that ‘potty’ could become more useful to a parent by noting how many times the child went, and whether or not he/she pooped or not. She currently jots down ‘stories’ about the girl she babysits for the parents in a notebook, and would like an easy way to do that. Our nanny wishes she was better at taking pictures and sharing them, and felt that having an tablet would make this task a lot easier. Overall, she really liked the site and found most things intuitive.
Our second nanny was also very helpful and close to our target user population. She is a 24-year old, who has been a nanny and has taught daycare aged children in school. She feels very comfortable with computers. Again, although she is not a current daycare worker and is not in our target user population, she has a very similar perspective into what a worker might want in such a website.
Our third user was a 22-year old student with years of babysitting experience as a teenager. She identified herself with medium computer experience. She is probably the farthest from our target daycare worker population, and did not have as much to say about the usefulness of our website. However, she mentioned that she really liked the ‘share story’ idea, and could imagine how a parent would love to hear stories and see pictures. Overall, she found the site very intuitive and usable.
Some common usability problems included:
Issue | Page | Type | Severity | Possible Solution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
The lunch sidebar was overlooked when trying to report a lunch |
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. | Report Lunch | Learnability | Minor | We could add tool tips that remind the user to add a meal if they try changing the meal first. We are not too concerned about this, because once the user learns about the sidebar, it becomes obvious to learn how to use. |
The labels "Checked In" and "Checked Out" were confusing to some people. They were mistaken for actions instead of states. | Check In/Out | Learnability | Minor | We could rewrite the labels to be "In" and "Out" to get rid of the connotation with action. |
It wasn't entirely clear that the "Who?" input was tokenized rather than just a normal text field. When the users typed too fast, they can miss the search results causing their entry to not be inputted. | Share a Story | Learnability | Minor | Again, this would cease to be a problem as soon as the user is shown this fact. However, a tooltip could pop up to aid users if the user is unable to successfully add a child. Also, we could make the search results pop up faster. |
Fields like Energy, Potty, and Mood are hard to quantify. | Daily Log | Affordance | Minor | We could make the options for Potty, include a quantified number of times. We could provide extra information on how to quantify Energy and Mood in a tooltip or a help menu. This information could include particular criteria to make quantification easier. |
Reflection
We learned a lot through out the process of designing and redesigning ChildFeed. One of the main lessons from class that we learned first-hand was the difficulty of finding an optimal balance between efficiency and learnability. One of the main problems we found during testing is that often when we tried to make a feature more efficient, we ended up sacrificing learnability and vice versa. For example, our original design for Check-in/Check-out was more efficient than our current one, but it was much harder to learn how to use. However, as we continued to test and evaluate our designs we steadily progressed towards better balances.
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