...
Imagine that you are a professor trying to find a qualified student to work in your lab, which produces user interfaces for educators to easily create classroom materials. You would like to be able to see and potentially contact selected students who have taken 6.813 (UI design) and 11.127 (Computer Games and Simulations for Investigation and Education). Because your project is built in Java, you want students who have Java experience, but if they know C++ and Matlab they would also be able work on your project. Your tasks will be to use our user interface to search for qualified students, see more information about they students, and contact the ones you are interested in.
Scenario Tasks
Task 1:
Search for students who have taken both 6.813 and 11.127.
...
None of our users even attempted to drag and drop the tags together to create an OR. Similarly, they all had extreme difficulties with adding OR inputs.... they just didn't know what the expected behavior was. This indicates a lot of learnability issues with entering requirements.
Some of the affordances people couldn't see like which buttons are clickable (email students/see hidden students probably should not be allowed until they actually do something). Another learnability issue was figuring out how to hide or remove users. The "X" in the upper right of each user card was difficult to see, so we decided that we need to make it more visible and make it's effects more clear. The solution is to remove the "X" and add a "Hide Student" button next to the view profile information. We also are going to remove the bottom left "View Hidden Users" button in favor of moving it up to the upper right next to "Create New Search." This change will move it closer to the "Undo" message that gets shown.
...