EVALUATION
Users:
User 1: Female junior
User 2: Female graduate student
User 3: Male senior
Our users have all frequented crowded and busy elevators on a regular basis. Because most students have worked or lived in tall buildings with busy elevators, we found users by emailing around 50 people and observed the first few people who expressed interest in being users. After the user testing process, we asked each of our users about their elevator experiences in the past. All users said that they used elevators at least several times a day. Examples of elevators they used were the elevators at the Stata Center and in the Green Building
Briefing:
We created a new elevator interface. We’re going to walk you through a few scenarios and look at how users will interact with our new interface. If you want to stop at any point in time, just let us know. Imagine you’ve just walked into a high-rise building that has 10 floors. Yes, just pretend that each floor is really tall. You walk into the lobby, and there are 4 elevators — 2 on the left and 2 on the right. You see this display (show interface of main lobby display). This display is found on every floor.
Task 1: You walk into the building, and you have to get to a job interview in 3 minutes on the 6th floor. Get to the 6th floor.
Task 2: Now the company is sending you down to HR on the 3rd floor. When you get to the elevator, there is someone there also going to the 2nd floor.
(once in the elevator)
One other person is in the elevator with you. And he has a panic attack and needs to get out immediately.
Task 3: Now you get to go home! You need to get back to the 1st floor to leave the building.
(There are multiple people on your floor going to multiple floors in your building. The elevator going to floor 1 is also being assigned to multiple higher floors - basically this means that the elevator is going to go up before going down to the 1st floor)
Justification of briefing:
The briefing was done similarly to the first round of user testing with the paper prototypes. The basic set-up was the same, but we added more complexity to the tasks since we implemented more features and the features were associated with certain interactions.
In task 1, we wanted to see how a user would use the interface in the lobby to get to their desired floor. In task 2, we wanted to see wanted to see how a user would react to an emergency situation when in the elevator. We wanted to test this because one of the responses we received was that people were unsure of what to do to get out of the elevator in an emergency situation. For task 3, we wanted to see how a user would react when their assigned elevator was assigned to go up before going down to their floor — we wanted to see whether a user would get into the elevator early, go up and then go down, or wait for the elevator to arrive on their current floor a second time and just go down. This was a test for our interface above the elevator as well as the interface inside the elevator.
Usability problems and solutions:
Problem: The flashing between the floor number and letter representing an elevator on the lobby display was distracting and confusing. Two of our users questioned whether the letters and colors were associated.
Solution: We couldn’t just get rid of either the colors or letters. For a majority of the users, the colors would probably be fine; however, we wanted to have letters so that people who were color-blind wouldn’t have trouble finding their elevator. We discussed two ways of solving this problem. First, we would make the animation of the button changes smoother — more fading rather than flashing. Second, we would also create a key on the screen at the top of the display — each letter would be placed on top of or next to a colored box. This would make it more obvious that the colors and letters were associated.