Design
Although our design maintained the general look and feel from the original prototype to our final design, many of the interface aspects changed significantly throughout the process.
This screen represents the landmark selection screen that allows users to choose the landmarks they would like to have included in their tour. There are several features on this screen that evolved throughout the testing and implementation phases. First, the names of the tabs changed several times. We believe the final naming scheme represents to the user what each of the tabs is meant for; select landmarks in the first tab, view/edit them in the second. Next, the text at the bottom was altered to ensure that users know the purpose of selecting landmarks on the map while also providing them feedback on the expected results they would find if they continued. Third, a small popup indicating the name of the landmark selected was added so users would know what they have chosen.
This screen displays to the user what landmarks they have selected from the map view. It allows them to remove unwanted selection as well as view a short description of each landmark. Since users cannot select new landmarks, the name of the tab was changed from "List View" to "My selections" to indicate that this screen was for viewing current selections only.
This screen represents what the user sees when following a tour they have selected. Paths are drawn according to from landmark to landmark in the order they appear in the tour. Arrows were added to clarify the which direction along the path users are meant to follow.
This screen displays how users create new tours and add them to the database. Selecting landmarks will highlight them and add them to the current tour. Updated paths (with arrows) are drawn as users make changes to the tour. Below the map, users can edit the current state of the tour by either removing unwanted landmarks (by pressing the X) or reordering landmarks (by dragging and dropping using the dots). Although selecting a landmark (using the map) already in the tour removes it from the list, the X was added next to each selection to allow users a second way of removing landmarks. Additionally, the drag and drop selection area was increased since some users were unaware of that functionality. Pressing the "Save Tour" button brings up a popup window in which the user enters a tour name and description. This box, along with the error message displayed for insufficient or illegal information, was changed to make it more clear what the user was supposed to do. Also, when an error is made, Torch now returns the user to the "Save Tour" popup with the current information still in tact rather than closing the popup and making them reenter information.
Add a new section GR6 User Testing to your group's wiki page, with the following subsections:
- DesignDescribe the final design of your interface. Illustrate with screenshots. Point out important design decisions and discuss the design alternatives that you considered. Particularly, discuss design decisions that were motivated by the three evaluations you did (paper prototyping, heuristic evaluation, and user testing).
- ImplementationDescribe the internals of your implementation, but keep the discussion on a high level. Discuss important design decisions you made in the implementation. Also discuss how implementation problems may have affected the usability of your interface.
- EvaluationDescribe how you conducted your user test. Describe how you found your users and how representative they are of your target user population (but don't identify your users by name). Describe how the users were briefed and what tasks they performed; if you did a demo for them as part of your briefing, justify that decision. List the usability problems you found, and discuss how you might solve them.
- ReflectionDiscuss what you learned over the course of the iterative design process. If you did it again, what would you do differently? Focus in this part not on the specific design decisions of your project (which you already discussed in the Design section), but instead on the meta-level decisions about your design process: your risk assessments, your decisions about what features to prototype and which prototype techniques to use, and how you evaluated the results of your observations.
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Implementation
We developed for Android 2.3 using the Google Maps APIs and Eclipse. We thought that this would allow us to take advantage of recent improvements to the Android OS, but still support a majority of users. The server is PHP with a MySQL database. Requests are sent from the app, and the servers responds with XML, which is parsed by the app. We tested our app on the Nexus One, Galaxy Nexus, and several other models of Android phones. The test phones included operating system 2.3, but also version 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich.
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