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- His tour guide wasn't listed under MIT which was confusing. We used canned information bc we didn't know who would run the tours.
- Wasn't sure if the Map page was supposed to do more than it did.
- Wanted to focus on the school and looking around, so he would only use the app in uninteresting or quiet places.
- Didn't know what the Star rating on the feedback page was for.
- Didn't know where his feedback was going to go (to the tour guide or to their boss.) and seemed concerned.
- Would prefer if the feedback page had discrete sliders. Continuous ranges were hard to choose from
Reflection
The main thing we would do differently in the class would be to try and focus on a more specific problem for our project. We think it would have been fruitful to work on just the Question Queue and use that as our application, rather than trying to satisfy every need of our target user group. We think the final product would have been a lot more polished, and we would have had more time to work on usability issues, which is the focus of the class. We may have even had time to focus on catering our UI to another one of our other user groups: the tour guides. We also made the decision to use node.js for this project. However, since none of our members had prior experience with node, we spent a lot of time trying to learn node on the fly while coding our application. Since every member on our team did know Rails, if we had coded our application in Rails we could have spent less time on the back end of the application and we wouldn't have had to compromise on our UI and everything we wanted to accomplish with it.
This course was a very interesting introduction into the world of usability testing. We all came into this class with high expectations, and the we feel as though the whole the class delivered. The lectures were engaging and interactive and we learned a lot. More specifically, we learned how to effectively user test, complete heuristic evaluations, methods of prototyping and the iterative design process, the 3 main principles (safety, efficiency, learn ability) of design, and the importance of typography and color schemes. We also had a brief introduction to the internationalization and accessibility of design. The project gave us a chance to implement and experiment with many of these ideas. We feel that the process allowed us to grow a great deal as computer scientists and helped develop the way in which we view UI design.
The main thing we would do differently in the class would be to try and focus on a more specific problem for our project. We think it would have been fruitful to work on just the Question Queue and use that as our application, rather than trying to satisfy every need of our target user group. We think the final product would have been a lot more polished, and we would have had more time to work on usability issues, which is the focus of the class. We may have even had time to focus on catering our UI to another one of our other user groups: the tour guides.
Two Two members from our team also do regret not making it to the panel in class this semester as well (they were late each time), as they felt as though they would have gained a lot as active participants. However However, overall our experience in that class has been fantastic. We had great support from our TA Chong-U along the way and we would like to thank him for his patience and help in every step in this project! :)