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Usability Problems

Use the following template when entering your problems. The last person entering usability problems should delete this. Only enter problems that haven't already been summarized below.

-Problem Statement-

• Heuristic: -Details-
• Severity: -Details-
• Description: -Details-
• How to Solve: -Details-

-Problem Statement-

User are not noticing the next Carpool Search panel

• Rating: Major
• Heuristic: Learnability
• Problem: The user did not notice that the next panel appears after clicking the appropriate buttons.
• Solution: Have the focus change the new panel when it appears.

Maps are grabbing the scroll function

• Rating: Minor
• Heuristic: Consistency, Track state (i.e., mode)
• Problem: As the user scrolled around the page using the mouse wheel, if the mouse crossed a map, the page would stop scrolling and the map would zoom in and out.
• Solution: Turn off the functionality that allows the user to zoom using the scroll wheel. Instead, let them change the zoom by clicking on the appropriate buttons in the map.

The time of a given class is not displayed

• Rating: Minor
• Heuristic: Anticipation
• Problem: If the user is curious when a certain event meets for which he or she is signed up, no tab on our site shows him or her the time.
• Solution: Add the timings of each event to the My Carpools tab.

A stronger confirmation is needed on the Swap Dates tab

• Rating: Major
• Heuristic: Feedback
• Problem: After swapping dates with someone, the user does not get a message summarizing his or her new date.
• Solution: Add a stronger confirmation message.

Popup confirmations are too obtrusive and easily ignored.

• Rating: Major
• Heuristic: Efficiency, Safety
• Problem: The user ignored popup confirmations.
• Solution: Use in-page confirmations that fade away automatically.
• Heuristic: -Details-
• Severity: -Details-
• Description: -Details-
• How to Solve: -Details-

Reflection

Early Stages

• Overall, we think that paper prototyping is very effective, especially since most people don’t think to do it in this high-tech day and age.
• One thing we noticed was that we took safety into consideration early on. However, when we were developing the paper prototype, our designed emphasized efficiency; as young people without children, we had a preference for efficient designs. It was only after user testing on the paper prototype that we realized how important safety was.
• We learned that it is really important to understand our user class because that defines what they want. It sometimes takes multiple iterations to get usability right. It took three iterations of scrapping what we did in order to make the Swap Dates and Full Schedule features intuitive for users.

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