DogPack - GR6 User Testing

Table of Contents

Design

Design decisions changed somewhat drastically after each stage of prototyping and user testing. 

After early prototyping:

Significant changes were made during this phase of the design. Our prototype was tested by three users. We got the following feedback from our users.

User 1:

1. Show current date in the calendar for scheduling a meetup
2. Separate date from time. It’s ambiguous. Possibly put it on the next line
3. Location field could be a pop-up of map when scheduling an event
4. Misspelling a letter might cause a situation
5. Also users might not know exact location -> Placeholder should support exact and similar locations
6. Default message of invitation helps user to understand he/she is expected to send
7. Review meetup. Buttons looked like pictures
8. Change history to past events
9. Switch upcoming meetings to the left

User 2:

1. Accept/Reject Page : Availability is not obvious
2. Hitting Calendar for “Meet up”
3. Hit’s previous meetups title for meetup

User 3:

1. Hit Meetup -> cupcake to review Allen (mistake)
2. Hit History title/Review to review => affordance not good.

We made the following design decisions. 

• The calendar on the schedule should show the current date. The date should be separated from the time. We kept the location field as a text field.
• We changed history to past events.
• We changed the buttons for the review.
• We switched the position of upcoming meetings on the home page.

After heuristic evaluation:

Our heuristic evaluation turned out to be quite favorable. We consolidated our feedback and the following design changes. We identified the need: 

• to standardize photo sizes for consistency in our layout
• to change font for regular text to standard fonts
• to rephrase the "meetup" button
• to standardize the time zone
• for better affordance for review buttons
• to improve the search results page
• to show the previous in the reschedule page
• to show specific confirmation alerts
• to not use a textbox to display date/time on the schedule page

We took this feedback into consideration in finishing up the design of the interface.

After user testing:

User testing still revealed shortcomings with interface that might have been difficult to perceive earlier. 

Implementation

The website has been tested using Google on the Windows 8 and Mac OSX platforms.

Evaluation

Our user testing involved the following tasks:

Task 1 : Respond to the invitation from 'Lassy'
Task 2 : Search for dogs in Beacon Hill and schedule a meetup with "Cupcake"

Task 3 : Review a previous meetup with 'Allen'
Task 4 : Reschedule the meetup invitation from 'Tony'

Reflection