GR6 - User Testing

Design

Final Design

In our final design, we divided our website into three pages: Search, Results, and Friends. These pages were navigated with a tab interface. The search page allowed users to input their search criteria. It included a widget that allowed users to efficiently select times for which they were busy, as well as a drop down menu for selecting specific departments. The results page displayed the results of their search in a gigantic table which was organized by starting-time of the class. Finally, the friends page allowed a user to search for their friends and see what classes they were taking. 

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Search Page

Results Page

Friends Page

Design Decisions

One of our biggest design decisions was to make our interface very visual and to incorporate drag-and-drop operation. Our reasoning was that this scheme has been growing in popularity, so it would be familiar and comfortable for many reasons. Our alternatives were a more conventional interface that simply displayed all the results in a list instead of providing an elaborate graphical interface, and an interface entirely based on text commands for efficiency. The results from our paper prototyping and our heuristic evaluation made us more confident about this design decision, because everyone seemed to like the colorful, draggable interface. In addition, we found that a common use pattern was that people selected a small subset of courses that they were interested in and then wanted to compare them side-by-side to make their final course decisions. With a tradition interface that simply listed all results vertically, such as the current Course Catalog, users reported that they often opened two tabs and switched back and forth between them to accomplish this; by representing courses as manipulable objects we enabled users to physically group the courses they were interested in in just one window.

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We did not provide any demo as part of our user testing.

Briefing

I Can Has HASS is a schedule planning and course selection tool aimed at helping MIT students to select humanities courses each semester.

The site allows students to search for courses matching certain criteria, look at what courses their friends are taking, and keep track of courses that they are considering taking. Students can also construct a projected schedule based on their selections.

As you complete the tasks given to you, please vocalize your thought process as much as possible. This is especially important if you become confused or frustrated, because that means you have identified a problem in our design, and telling us what you are thinking will help us fix it.

Remember that you are free to quit the experiment for any reason, at any time.

Thank you for helping us to improve I Can Has HASS!

Tasks

1. Search for HASS classes of the following criteria:
   1. All HASS categories except 4 and Elective.
   2. No final exam
   3. Don't care about CI-H
   4. Not interfering with your other class, which meets 1-4pm on Wednesdays
   5. From departments STS, 21F, and 9
2. Select two classes and mark them as a classes that you are considering.
3. Compare the details of these classes side-by-side
4. Add Mark Zhang as a friend. Add one of his classes to classes you're taking.
5. Decide you no longer want to take one of the classes you were considering.
6. Decide you definitely want to take the other class you were considering.
7. Remove Mark from your list of friends.
8. Print the classes that you have selected.

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