Table of Contents
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Briefing
Thank you for volunteering to test our prototype for 6.813/6.831 User Interface Design. Our website is a tool designed for parents of school-aged children to coordinate carpooling for school and after-school activities. Our goal is to create an easy-to-use interface that makes it easy to set up carpools, helps users keep track of commitments, allows for scheduling flexibility, and ensures the safety of the children.
Scenario and Tasks
We have created three roles in which you will play the parts of the various parents participating in the carpool.
First Role
Your name is Jane, you have a son, Bob, who has signed up for Underwater Basket Weaving, and you want to carpool with other parents. You live at 1234 Fake St., Bakersfield, CA 93203. You also need to keep in mind that your family is going on vacation from 4/22 to 4/29.
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- Task 3: Swap one of your dates for a new one.
Second Role
Your name is Vladimir, one of the other parents in Jane’s basket-weaving carpool. Jane has proposed to swap dates with you, and you need to accept her proposal to complete the swap.
- Task 4: Agree to swap dates with Jane.
Third Role
Your name is Alyssa, another one of the other parents in Jane’s basket-weaving carpool. It is your turn to pick up the kids, but the other parents want to know that their kids are safe. Luckily, we have a mechanism for letting them keep track of where you are on the pickup route.
- Task 5: Use the mobile app to allow the other parents track your drive.
First Iteration
Prototype Photos
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Observations from User Tests
To protect anonymity, we will refer to our three testers for this round as User A, User B, and User C.
User A
Task 1
- The user enters “Underwater basket weaving, Bakersfield, CA,” hits tab, and presses submit. He mentions that he would have expected the cursor to be in the text field by default.
- He clicks on the first class.
- He clicks on the button for entering his address.
- He likes seeing that Alyssa and Vladimir are nearby. He comments that this motivates him to go further. He asks how far the class is from his home, and notes that the interface should display that information.
- He then clicks the on the button for adding himself to the carpool but feels confused because he wants to know more about the people in the carpool first. He wants to click on their names and see a profile. This is a safety issue; the interface is not providing the adequate information prior to setting up a carpool.
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- The user remarks that “Track Ride” is a little confusing because he wants to track his ride, not track another parent’s. However, he was able to quickly run through all the steps.
User B
Task 1
- The user enters, “Underwater basket weaving, Bakersfield, CA”. He feels that the field is too generic and would have preferred to see a “Location” field in addition to a description field.
- He clicks on the first class.
- He strongly resists going further because he doesn't want to carpool with people he doesn’t know, for the safety of his children.
- The user clicks the button to enter his address.
- Upon seeing that Alyssa and Vladimir are close to him, the user wonders whether they are close to him in the direction of the class or another direction. He suggests putting a map on the page.
- The user tries to select Alyssa and Vladimir, but doesn’t understand why there are no checkboxes and fails to see the button to add himself to the carpool.
- Upon seeing that button, he clicks it, signs up, checks the boxes for Alyssa and Vladimir, and proceeds.
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- The user quickly selects “Underwater Basket Weaving” and then “Track Ride.”
- The user remarks that there is confusion with the vocabulary “Track Ride” since he would be doing that to track someone else’s ride, not his own ride.
User C
Task 1
Task 2
- The user feels confusion between selecting the "Next Date" tab or the "My Carpools" tab
- He views the full schedule.
- He successfully confirmed his date.
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- The user quickly completes the task, but like the other two users, notes confusion over the wording.
Summary of Usability Problems
Learnability
Safety
Efficiency
Second Iteration
Changes to Prototype
- Some users wished that the date were displayed somewhere on the interface. We chose to add a date display after "Welcome,_______."
- Because some users mistakenly looked around in "My Carpools" before noticing the "Next Date" tab, we decided to highlight the tab to make it more obvious.
- It was noted that the calendar would be more useful if it weren't limited to a single month. We added the option for the user to browse between months.
- Some users were frustrated with the lack of undo options on both the calendar loading and date swapping interfaces. We added the option to toggle the calendar between expanded and contracted states. We changed the date swapping interface from a pop-up screen to its own tab, so that users would be able to navigate away and return at will.
- Some non-native English speaking testers were confused by the wording on the "My Carpools" tab. We had referred to the user as "You" when assigning pickup dates on the schedule, which could be misconstrued as a person's name in some languages. In this new prototype, we decided to simply refer to the user by their name instead.
- Users had trouble figuring out how to swap dates. We decided to add a separate tab specifically devoted to date swaps so that the function could be more easily accessed.
- Originally, we didn't want to include instructions because, as discussed in class, a good user interface does not require much explanation. However, swapping dates is not a regular function, and all of our testers had trouble with that task. We decided to include more descriptive instructions for the swapping interface, sacrificing efficiency for the sake of learnability.
- Users wanted to be able to view their schedules before agreeing to a swap, so we included an option to allow them to view their full carpooling schedules on the same page, improving efficiency through anticipation.
- Because all three users complained about the wording for the ride tracking interface on the mobile app, we changed "Track Ride" and "Untrack Ride" to "Enable Ride Tracking" and "Disable Ride Tracking," respectively, to make the button labels more intuitive and improve learnability.
Prototype Photos
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Observations from User Tests
To protect anonymity, we will refer to our three testers for this round as User D, User E, and User F.
User D
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Task 4
Task 5
- Blah Blah Blah
User E
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Task 4
Task 5
- Blah Blah Blah
User F
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Task 4
Task 5
- Blah Blah Blah