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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. She commented that as a care provider, at the end of the day when the parents ask what happened, it's hard to remember which child did what. She thought this website would be helpful to keep track and also serve as a way for parents to know without having to ask each day. She mentioned that this would be helpful in writing quarterly reviews for the children, which is common practice in her job caring for 3-year-olds. She really liked the filtering options available in the archives page, especially by child. She imagined this being helpful to see what each parent would see. She commented that the 'mood' slidebar indicator could be improved by turning it into a flag that signals a problem. This could be used to send a notification to the parent of a problem. Overall, she thought the website was very useful, and could be a selling point for a daycare that utilized it.
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 picturesstories and see pictures. She had good comments about the usability of our site. Overall, she found the site Childfeed very intuitive and usable.
Some common usability problems includedthat our user tests highlighted:
Issue | Page | Type | Severity | Possible Solution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
The lunch sidebar was overlooked when trying to report a lunch. | 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. |
The "+" in the lunch sidebar was misleading and gives the accordance of a link or dropdown menu. | Report Lunch | Affordability | Cosmetic | Remove it. Possibly have a dropdown menu of previously used lunches. |
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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