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
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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.
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- 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.
- 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.
- 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. The same can be said about choosing your availability when setting up a carpool. We decided to include more descriptive instructions for availability and the swapping interfaces, sacrificing efficiency for the sake of learnability.
- Users had a lot of trouble figuring out how to swap dates. We decided to scrap our original design altogether and add a separate tab specifically devoted to date swaps so that the function could be more easily accessed (also ties in with efficiency).
- 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.
Efficiency
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- Some users wished that the date were displayed somewhere on the interface. We chose to add a date display after "Welcome,_______."
- 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 thought that it would be helpful for additional information to be displayed on the full schedule. We decided not to go forward with this suggestion because we wanted the interface to be as simple as possible, providing on the relevant information.
- 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.
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- For some users, highlighting "Next Date" might not be enough; perhaps it should be the default tab.
- One user noted that the driving directions interface should more closely resemble Google Maps.
Efficiency
- There should be a shortcut to "Next Date" from "My Carpools."
- One user noted that we could display the next date without necessarily requiring the user to visit the tab. We could implement a tool tip here.
- The date swapping interface for agreeing to swaps should not be divided between an acceptance step and a date selection step. It should all be in one place.
- As in Round 1, users in this round also wanted more information to be shown on the calendar. Perhaps syncing with Google Calendar would solve this problem.
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