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The idea of the design was to mobile focused because of the touring and moving aspect of the application. Most of the interface was reduced to just tapping and sliding, which were very easy operations to do with just one's finger or thumb. The only times where the user would have to use more would be when typing in the Search or Feedback sections.
Home Page
The home page and the checkin page represent two design structures that we use throughout the interface with the aid of jquery.mobile. The home page shows a very familiar list of options with big buttons to press. During paper prototyping every user was able to dive right into the application because getting to other pages was very intuitive.
Question Queue
The question queue was the focus of our application in the interaction between tourists and tour guides. In our computer prototyping design, each asked question was labeled with a time-since stamp, however most users were confused by this. i.e. "How many students go here? 10min" means the question was submitted 10 minutes ago, but it was confused with "will be asked in 10 minutes" and "The question was answered 10 minutes ago." For our final design, we removed this. Having the new questions drop to the bottom of the queue was enough to show the user how the system worked.
Stories/Profile Pages
The story page is very similar to the home page in that it is essentially a list of items. In paper prototyping, users frequently weren't sure if you could click on the stories to go somewhere else, but this issue was solved in computer prototyping. In earlier designs we also had an excerpt from the story instead of the whole story, but in computer prototyping, most users didn't seem to mind it too much as they were still able to skim stories quickly.
The profile page is very simple, with only the student's photo and various facts about themselves. Users varied between wanting the profile information already expanded or if they wanted it expanded when clicked.
Events Page
Like the stories page, the events page is essentially just a scrollable list. However the events page allows for changing the date and does not allow you to click on the events. The idea of only having a "Previous Day" and a "Next Day" buttons came by in paper prototyping because most tourists would only be in town for a few days and could thus find only relevant information. The URL was descriptive though and used the ISO standard of YYYY-MM-DD, so more advanced users that wanted to jump to specific dates could just type them quickly and simply into the URL.
General Stats/FAQ
The design for this page showed the differences between Paper Prototyping and Computer Prototyping. During paper prototyping, very few users understood how to move the graphs around and would end up either stuck or would try to click on the small grey circles below the graphs. However, during computer prototyping everybody understood how to slide the graphs from left to right without any direction at all. This shows us how you have to take paper prototyping results with a grain of salt and should retest design decisions on the computer if you have doubts abut their learnability.
Feedback
The feedback page was very simple. We used sliders for all three inputs because of their easy entry on mobile devices. Users asked for discrete sliders though, because they found it would be easier to decide on a rating if they were given a discrete range instead of a continuous range.
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Map
The Map page ended up being very simple, with just a map zoomed in on one's current location. Originally there were going to be additions to the map design, but they proved too ambitious for the scope of this project. This page became useful just because of the accessible map even though it was empty otherwise.
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