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The user was a 42 year old white male geek who occasionally travels for work and uses an ipad regularly. I
I instructed the user to pick Flourence as we had not implemented the ability to change cities in the splash page.
Usability Problems:
- The user began by clicking on a particular place on the map to try to pick an event. Finding that that did not work, he he looked around the map to pick places and then typed their names into the text field. He said he wanted a search feature for the map where you can find restaurants.
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- (major) This indicates not so much a flaw as a lack of a feature.
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- An improvement would greatly increase the efficiency of the application.
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- At the
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- time of the evaluation, changing the start and end time caused the schedule to disappear.
- (catastrophic) It rendered the application unusable until the user pressed undo. This was fixed by demo time.
- He was frustrated by the fact that when he typed the name of a location, it did not search for the location and place the pin at that place.
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- (major) This is easy to overcome but decreases efficiency
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- He automatically plans for walking time when the number of events in the schedule is small. However, when it is large, he left an unrealistically short amount of time between activities.
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- (minor) This can be overcome as the user will learn not to do it, but it will make him late to things the first few days.
It would be good if you could click on the map to pick a place. if they type a full name, search for the location with google maps he thought of the idea that he could drag the thing to where he wants to go. that worked well, but placing it there, it did not stay.
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- There is no way to save the schedule. Thus, the user has to leave the application open the whole time
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- (catasrophic) Realistically, the user is going to be closing and opening this application.
- Clicking on the pin of a scheduled event, the nature of the info displayed is non-obvious and less than useful.
- (minor) This
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- doesn't impede usability except by confusing the user why it is there momentarily.
- It took him a while to discover that you can lock something. The lock icon should be within something that looks like a button.
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- (minor) This is discoverable, just after a while.
- It is hard to lock things because clicking the lock is hard. It should be bigger.
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- (major) This is a major flaw in that
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- it causes the user frustration in using the feature.
- Redo does not completely redo operations, as it ignores locking.
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- (minor) The user can still manually redo all operations.
- Selecting an event should pan such that the event is visible on the map.
- (minor) This just requires the user to spend more time panning around and remembering.
Usability Successes:
He finds the dragging of events from the todo list to the schedule very intuitive, as well as resizing events and moving them around to change event times. He also finds it intuitive to be able to drag the map pin to the location of the event in order to place it.
Notes:
He did not use autoschedule That it does not do this makes it less learnable for the user to change the location. This is a major flaw.At the time of the evaluation, changing the start and end time caused the schedule to disappear. This was a catastrophic flaw, how ever was fixed by the time of the demo.
He expressed a desire for a button that just says "pick stuff for me to do" that picks the top-10 reccomended activities in the city. He did not use autoscheduleI am skeptical.
User 2
User 2 was a grad student from the media lab. We chose this user because the user has never been to Florence but has some experience planning trips.
Usability problems:
- User tried tapping instead of dragging the resize handles. (minor)
- Possible solution: better grip icons
- Earliest start and latest end times were unintuitive and unused by the user. When the grey bars appeared, the user was unsure of their meaning. (minor)
- Possible solution: remove feature altogether.
- On multiple occasions, the user tried to add a new activity while an activity was selected. Because the uses the same form to add a new activity as to edit an activity, a new activity could not be added until the activity was deselected. (major)
- Possible solution: Do not reuse the form to edit activities. Make the form inside the activity or as a popup box.
- User tried pressing the “Schedule these activities for me” when there were no activities in the unscheduled activities column. It is unclear to users that auto-schedule does not help optimize the current schedule, but instead optimally moves unscheduled items into the schedule. (major)
- Possible solution: Make more descriptive label for button
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- User was able to quickly add all the activities he wanted to do that day
- User understood and used the dialogue for change the start and end time of the day
- User quickly discovered how to move location markers on the map since the marker said "Drag Me!"
- The user was able to select an activity by clicking on the corresponding location marker on the map.
- The user immediately understood that the activity boxes were meant to be dragged.
User 3
User 3 was a college graduate (early/mid twenties age range) who had just finished applying to law school. This user was chosen because his personality was meticulous and thought-out but had very little experience planning trips.
Usability problems:
- User had a different iPad with a different resolution: the "end of day" pull down was not on the screen and there was no indication of where it was supposed to be. (minor)
- Possible Solution: set default day to be sufficiently small so that the entire (default) schedule fits on one screen with high guarantee (easy fix). OR adjust based on dynamic iPad resolution (more difficult).
- As described in the list of tasks, finding the specific locations on the map was difficult. It was confusing to have to constantly zoom in and out of the map to pinpoint locations. (major)
- Possible Solution: allow the users to input street addresses to locate places, as opposed to pinning the location down on the map itself.
- User complained that activities disappeared all of a sudden (the user had accidentally clicked the X button for that activity). Fortunately, there is an undo button but the user did not see it (the facilitator had to give a hint). (major)
- Possible solution: ask for confirmation when an activity is to be moved from the List of Activities column to the trash.
- There was no way to specify "end of day" when setting the latest start time---one can only specify exact times. (minor)
- Possible solution: add both "end of day" and "beginning of day" to the start time/end time pull-downs.
- There is no way to make an activity with no location. User wanted to have lunch anywhere around 12p-2p (minor)
- Possible solution: if the user specifies no location for an activity, that activity will still take up space in the schedule column but not appear on the map for distance routing purposes
- User did not use the lock button for the opera. (minor)
- Possible solution: add an element in the "Add Activity" flow for specifying specific starting times.
- User did not use the auto-schedule button. (minor)
- Possible solution: Couple the auto-schedule button more tightly with the schedule column (see below for details).
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