Photos of both prototype iterations are on the bottom of the page, for use because they are used in explaining changes between the two iterations.
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All three test users wanted to be able to focus on one specific word and see many sentences for that one word. Only one user knew how to change the settings in the ‘My Vocab’ tab to accomplish this. After we told them an approach to accomplish this, all users thought that the proposed approach (which required going to ‘My Vocab’ and changing the word lists) was unreasonable because it required too many permanent changes in the word lists and would be difficult to revert once finished studying the word.
Iteration 2:
User 4
* The user feels offended by the title “Singlish for Dummies”
* At the welcome screen, the user tries to click the text ‘Select a Language’. This is an unexpected behavior. She says it would be easier if the selection was inline with the instructions.
* When the user is selecting chapters from a textbook, the user doesn’t want things to be happening until after she is finished selecting all the chapters. She is referring to the appearance of options and un-dimming of new available actions when a chapter is selected.
* She thinks that the “+” expand icon is inappropriate for the ‘Show English Translation’ operation. She associates it with outlines and hierarchies.
* She is unsure about the words “Display this vocab” because she thinks unchecking it might make the current sentence disappear.
* After she focused on a word, the popup disappears. She is unsure how she would undo this action.
* She forgot the definition of the word she focused. She suggests constantly displaying the focused word’s definition somewhere to remind users.
* After she stops focusing on gamen and goes back to ‘review all vocabulary’, she is worried that she will see gamen when she goes back to “review all vocabulary”, and she might feel like she didn’t change the settings properly.
* The user succeeded in the task to make the system no longer display “goondu”, but she had initially been looking for words like ‘ban this word’ and felt that unchecking ‘Display this vocab in sentences’ didn’t evoke the same emotions as banning a word from future sentences.
* She was able to find the ‘Contribute Sentence’ feature, but she said she expected to have been introduced to this function directly when first visiting the site.
* The user expected more options to be offered in the sidebar for the word being focused on, such as ‘stop studying this word’ and a definition of the word being constantly displayed.
User 5
* User was fully able to comprehend initial introduction to the objectives, commenting on "Oh my gosh, this is so cute!"
* The initial tasks were aced by the user, having no trouble with language selection (mild complaints about handwriting). However, user got lost briefly while trying to figure out how to select textbooks.
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*User was able to successfully contribute sentences after initially typing the foreign language sentence in the wrong sentence box (the translations sentence box).
User 6
*During the briefing, the user was very excited to try out the interface.
*In the first task, the user was immediately struck by both instructions from the tasks and instructions from the interface, found language selection hard to locate at the top right half of the interface when reading instructions for language selection in the middle of the right half of the interface.
*The user was confused by the textbook chapter selection task, because unlike during the language selection, information regarding how to select textbook chapters were not part of the initial instructions set on the right side of the interface.
*After textbook selection, the user was overwhelmed by the number of possible entry points for selecting vocabulary words. There seemed to be a lack of cue as to what to click/type in next.
*When going through the sentences task, the user expressed confusion about both the selection box and the button on the flash card whose names seemed to indicate redundant functions.
Overall:
Two of the three users did not have issues with selecting the textbook and chapter. The third user was trying to explore and forgot about the task at hand, but was able to succeed at the task when reminded about that her task was to read sentences and not to browse individual words.
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