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- "There is no indication I can click on tanks to see the animals": The user didn't see the initial help box.
- "I appreciate the overall simplicity", Good comment! We think this reveals a good feedback on the main objectives of the design.
4.5. Usability Problems:
1. Users are not sure what will happen after they have purchased the ticket, e.g. what’s the form of confirmation.
Severity: Major
Solution: Assures the users that after purchasing the ticket that they would get a ticket number.
2. It is difficult to find the events related to a particular animal, such as little blue penguin.
Severity: Major
Solution: In the event page, add filter function to allow users to filter the events by keyword.
3. “Locate in Map” for an event only linked to that floor, so the users lost information about the particular tank for event location when to leave the event page"Search for Animal" seems to be redundant with “penguin” also typed into the box, which also suggests an animal could be searched.
Severity: MajorMinor
Solution: Link “Locate in Map” to not only the floor, but also the tank where the events are scheduled to happenReplace “penguin” in the search box by “Search for Animal” hint to simplify the interface.
4. "Search for Animal" seems to be redundant with “penguin” also typed into the box, which also suggests an animal could be searched.
Severity: Minor
Solution: Replace “penguin” in the search box by “Search for Animal” hint to simplify the interface.5. The users need to The users need to type in whole name of an animal or select one from the dropdown. For instance, searching for mistyped animal name returns Animal not found. It would be better if the system is more lenient with user input.
Severity: Minor
Solution: Implement backend database for animals and match substring sub-string for the animal search query.
65. Selecting an animal from the drop down suggestion does not automatically search for it. The users need to press Search button to perform searching.
Severity: Minor
Solution: After the user has selected an item from the drop down list, automatically performs searching to improve usability. This could be down by triggering the button click through jQuery code.
6. Some users don't see the initial help message in the map. This produces lack of information about the tank affordance.
Severity: Major
Solution: Keep this message for a longer time.
7. There is immediate information about ongoing events.
Severity: Minor
Solution: Include an icon for current events
8. There is no help for billing information, such as where to find the security code. This brokes external consistency and degrades usability.
Severity: Major
Solution: Include help icons as commonly used in other websites.
9. To perform a search, the user need to go to the search page. Some users want to have it immediately available.
Severity: Minor
Solution: The search box could be present in all pages.
Final comment on user testing: We observed that some of the problems found in the last set of user testing are now recurrent (no big variations among users) and known (no surprises or problems we haven't worked on the design) , and some of them are the consequence of some design decision that otherwise would have produce bigger problems. As general evaluation we think this is positive because it means we got an advance stage of iterative design trying to minimize the number of usability problems. There is no perfect design, but we observed satisfaction from users.
5. Reflection
Most of us are accustomed to using an engineering paradigm when approaching any design project. Because of this we initially focused on the intended functionality of our page; we tried to find problems users were having while at the aquarium and only thought about finding ways to solve them. However, as soon as we started getting feedback from other students and performing users tests we realized that presenting information or any resource to a user is not trivial and that a lot of widely-used design techniques we are used to having in our interfaces are essential. For example, during the paper prototype testing sessions, we thought users would have no problems with standard tasks like filling out a form with their credit card information, and would spend most of their time playing with our first map/scheduling interface. However, we found that most standard design decisions we take for granted, e.g., aligning and grouping input boxes that are related to each other, greatly affect the user experience. Similarly, in order to provide users with solutions to all their needs, our first design iterations had too much information on the screen, and had them traversing numerous screens. The studio discussions greatly helped us find ways to minimize the amount of information on the screen and to maximize simplicity. After taking all these things into consideration, we were able to converge on a simple, cyclical, design that allows the users to coarse-grain the information on the screen and to go iterate through animal, location, and event information.
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