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Another lesson from class that became clear to us we learned over the course of the iterative design , was the difficulty of predicting how users would interact with our designproduct. There were many times where we would take for granted that a particular feature was simple and easy to use, but user testing revealed otherwise. For example, we thought that users would easily understand how to use our Report Lunch feature without any assistance, but a number of users needed to be shown how to use it.
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One risk assessment that we made a mistake on, was the risk of not finding daycare workers that would be willing to test our product. We assumed that since user testing only takes 5-10 minutes per user and since ChildFeed is directly related to their profession that daycare workers would be more than just willing to participate in our user testing because ChildFeed is directly related to their profession and requires minimal time to test. Thus, we waited until we were done implementing ChildFeed , before we emailed to email the daycare workers in the TCC located in the Stata Center. We thought that there would be more than enough daycare workers who would be excited to test our project, but it turned out that we were wrong and that Unfortunately, they did not show nearly as much enthusiasm as we expected. Had we known that there might be difficulty in getting volunteers for our user testing among daycare workers in the TCC, we would have started the process of finding test users among the daycare worker population earlier. However, we believe that we were still able to more-or-less accurately evaluate our project with a less representative user population. We believe that our choice of testing ChildFeed on users who had experience taking care of young children in childcare gave us a good sense of how well daycare workers would have been able to use our interface.