We introduced Spotlight to our users, telling them that it was a collaborative photo sharing site. We explained that this would be a social site that can be used to share photos, similar to the way Facebook does it where people can view photos and comment. However, our site is different because it has the added benefit that friends could be allowed to add, delete, or rearrange photos in addition to just viewing the photos. We described that our site was similar to Google Docs, but for photos, where the owner of a circle could make photos view only or editable by friends.
The tasks we asked our users to perform were as follows:
We came up with two hypothetical personas that we gave to our users so they could get in the correct mindset while using our site. The first persona is a college student who is new to Photo Circle and wants to create a new circle to share photos with friends. This person was asked to perform tasks 1, 2, and 6. The second persona was a college student who was added to a circle and wanted to view newly posted photos in the circle. This person was asked to perform tasks 3, 4, and 5.