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- For efficiency purposes, some users hoped that there would be autocomplete entries in the text fields on the search screen
- There was some confusion and learnability issues with the "Region" text field because users did not know how specific to be or what regions would be accepted in their search (one user suggested the "Region" being a menu of some kind so that users do not have to guess at whta the system wants)
- Some confusion about which fields were optional or whether every field was required.
Task 2 (Select)
This task presented a little bit more of a challenge for users to complete than the first task, and our observations provided some important feedback for points of confusion in the interface
- One main learnability issue was entering the start and end dates of the trip to advance to the next screen. Users often weren't sure where the "Go" button was located, some tried to navigate using the "Plan" button on the bottom before filling in a date (note: we decided to combat the lack of date by having the default be the date of the search as the start date and one week later as the end date).
- Some of the zooming capabilities confused users and they did not understand what the values on the red circles meant, but once they discovered they could zoom by clicking on them and that the value represented the number of schools this feature was really learnable and intuitive.
- Some users did not realize that they could click on specific schools on the map to receive more information, however one user who did find this feature thought that the provided information was not detailed enough.
- A couple of users tried to click and drag schools from the map to the "Selections" panel, and others thought that all three panels weren't necessary because the map could provide the same capabilities as the "Results" panel.
- Originally one user was confused about why the results panel was empty (thought their search returned no results), but once they began zooming that became clear, so filling the results panel is learnable.
Task 3 (Plan)
Planning the actual visits appeared to be the most difficult task for users and the last screen seemed to be the least intuitive and cause the most issues for each user.
- At first some users struggled to figure out which school the events were being shown for, but others noticed that one school was highlighted right at the beginning.
- Many users were confused about what can be dragged and dropped and what had to be clicked and selected. Although playing around with the interface allowed many of them to figure out what could be dragged, it was not learnable at first and often things that they wanted to be able to drag (such as the events in the middle panel) would not drag, or others never discovered they could drag around the times in the "Schedule" panel.
- Some users were unclear about the use of the "Custom" panel and either didn't see it or didn't know how to use it. However, one user did select and add their own custom event to their trip successfully.
- Some users struggled because the layout didn't seem to flow with the decision process, so adjusting the layout will probably be necessary (observation after first iteration).
- Once users had finished planning their trip they would look for a way to either e-mail or print their itinerary or save it somewhere. Although we expect this capability to be possible with users creating accounts for the website, it was not intuitive for this round of prototyping.
- In our second iteration some users had trouble transitioning from the calendar to the tour times.
- Suggesting a default plan makes learnability of the sight challenging because users did not explore as much or realize they had the freedom to change things.