...
EZ-FIX is designed for housing managers, as such it is ideal to do user testing on them. Unfortunately, the semester wrapping up and Bexley hall closing has consumed resources and we were only able to do user testing on one house manager. This specific house manager was part of our initial need finding and was familiar with the problem we were trying to solve. In addition to the one house manager, we were able to test one professional staff and two student desk workers. The professional staff is close to our target user population because she is responsible for contacting various services (elevator and plumbing repair) for jobs within McCormick Hall and cares more about the overview of the facility status. Finally, student desk workers were chose and the closest alternative because they are sometimes faced with repair requests and are well informed of the building status. We noticed that the users had different technical abilities. Some users were familiar with google mail while others were not. While this didn't affect the user's ability to test our system, it did have an effect on the learnablity of various features (starring for example).
Users were briefed by being told of the problem -- that house manager have a difficult time organizing and prioritizing repair requests and the primary method for doing so it by making mental notes. They were told that they are acting as the house manager of McCormick hall and were not given a demo of the application. They were asked to speak aloud and especially note things they find confusing or visually unappealing so that we could get a better sense of the problems that they experience. A demo was not given because we felt that showing users how to perform different tasks would prevent us from finding learnability issues.
...