Jeffrey Chan, Ryan Lacey, Amruth Venkatraman
Protoypes
Photos
Iterations
How it changed.
Briefing
Thank you for volunteering to test our website mock up. We're working on a design for 6.813 and believe that your feedback will help us revise our design to be more intuitive and easy to use.
Our site, Your Turn, is a toy exchange website. Imagine you're middle aged man (or woman, depending) whose daughter, Susie, has an upcoming birthday. Susie has grown out of a lot of her old dolls and trading cards, so now they're wasting storage space. You decide to donate the unused toys and want to find something nice for Susie's birthday. You recognize that she has been talking about wanting to learn how to play an instrument a lot lately.
We'll provide you with a couple tasks to try to accomplish, but feel free to explore the space. We encourage you to talk aloud as you navigate the site, especially if you find something confusing or peculiar. And don't worry about trying to find "the right way" to do things. We are testing our site, not you, so any troubles you encounter reflect a flaw in our design. Your test results will be kept confidential. Feel free to stop at any time.
Tasks
- List donations on website.
- Search for a nice gift for Susie's birthday.
- Check messages to see if anyone has responded to your listing.
Observations
User 1
When User 1 first opened the user interface to complete his first task of giving a toy, he started by filling in his name and description until the “Condition” field tipped him off. As designers, we had assumed that the user would automatically know that we only cared about the toy’s information rather than the user himself’s information. Next, User 1 was curious as to what the box on the right entailed until he guessed that it might have to do with a picture, and he wished allowed that there was a placeholder picture. When the user saw the “add toy” option, he thought it would act like a submit and suggested using “Add Another Toy.” The user was also really confused with the difference between what a single item and a collection of items entails such as “Is a deck of cards a collection?”
For the second task, it was unclear to the user whether the images would dynamically change or there needed to be a submit button for the search. This was probably a result of the fact that the prototype could not change fast enough for the user to realize it was dynamically changing. The user had trouble figuring out how the drag-and-drop worked since clicking the image already showed more detailed information, so he did not think to drag the photo.
The “New” button was confusing to the user as to what exactly it would entail. Messaging was unclear to the user even though it was modeled after Facebook’s messaging feature.
User 2
When registering toys on the website, User 2 put his contact information in the description field of the list toys interface. This was unexpected as we expected people to use the messaging feature, but not being exposed to the product like we were, the user thought the description was the appropriate place to put the contact information. He also was a bit confused about there not being a placeholder image for the image box that is filled after selecting a URL or file from disk to populate it.
When User 2 proceeded to task 2, he tried searching for an “any” category that was looked over by the designers. He also struggled for a couple minutes trying to figure out how to add items to his shopping cart. Drag and drop was not natural for him. He made an interesting note on the benefit of having an affordance for hovering over the shopping cart, a feature that was not currently in place. On finishing task 2, he commented that there was a confirmation message after the message to the toy owner was sent. After hearing task 3, the user wondered why there was no notification in the header of the website telling him there was a notification.