Prototype Photos

Briefing

Can’t decide where to eat as a group? Play Dedice --- An interactive social decision-making game for dining out. Dedice will help you decide with “dice”, but with a twist. The randomness is weighted, so instead of blindly choosing a restaurant, Dedice will pick a restaurant for you based on the weighted preferences of location, price, and cuisine type that each player individually bets on. It’s fair. It’s fun. It’s Dedice!

Scenario Tasks

1) Group Selection Round - As a group, pick a couple of choices for location and cuisine type. You are all sharing one phone.

• For location: choose Kendall, Central, Harvard, and Chinatown. 
• For cuisine: choose American, Chinese, and Indian. 

2) Individual Betting Round - Take the phone to place bets on the location, cuisine, and price you want most. Pass the phone to the next player when you're done. 

3) Group Decision Round - As a group, Spin the Dedice Wheel once each for location, price and cuisine. 

4) Restaurant Voting Round - Vote on the restaurant choice that you like the most. Pass the phone to the next player when you're done. 

Observations

First Prototype

Learnability

Betting concept not completely clear

• Users did not understand the purpose of the betting screen. They did not realize that their individual coin assignments would be used later in a group decision round. As one user initially commented, "What am I betting on?" 
• Users did not understand that their coins were split across three criteria. They would often use all their coins on the first criteria (location), only to realize that there were more criteria (price, cuisine) to bet on later. This suggested that the idea of weighting across criteria was not clear (e.g., location is more important to a user than price). 

Transitions between group/individual components and between users were not clear

• Some users did not see the transition indicators for the betting round (e.g. Person 1/3), so they did not know when to switch player turns.
• Users did not know they were all sharing one mobile phone, so they did not know when to pass the phone to the next player.
• Users did not know when to switch between individual to group mode, and there were no labels to help them.
• Users did not know the initial round of selecting criteria was a group activity, so often, only one user would pick the choices. 

Some interface components were unclear and inconsistent

• Some users didn't notice or understand what individual transition labels (e.g., Person 1/3) in the betting rounds meant. This could have been caused by inconsistent terminology, as we used "Person" and "Player" (e.g., "How many players are in your group?" in initial screen) to refer to the same thing. 
• Some users didn't understand what the criteria labels (e.g., "Criteria 2/3)  in the betting rounds meant. We never explicitly referred to location, price, and cuisine as "criteria", so the word may have seemed random.
• The "+" button for adding criteria was placed on the top-left side of the screen, where the back arrow is usually placed. 
• The list of cuisine and location were not ordered in an obvious way (e.g. alphabetical).
• There was inconsistency between "Done" buttons and next arrows. 
• Many users didn't understand what the percentages meant on the choice wheel during the criteria decision rounds. 

Efficiency

Some convenience features were unnoticed (e.g., the "+" button on add-(location, cuisine, etc.) screens)

• Many users failed to notice the "+" button on the Add Location and Add Cuisine screens. 
• Many users did not realize the location and cuisine lists were scrollable. 
• Some users did not realize that their coins were exhausted in the coin pank, rendering all their subsequent selections void. 

Users tried using some efficiency features that didn't exist

• Users tried to drag the entire stack of chips instead of one 10-point chip at a time. We assumed people would drag them one at a time because they had to bet on multiple criteria and didn't allow for stack-dragging. 

Decision-Making process too lengthy

• Many users felt that there were too many criteria selection and criteria betting rounds. This made the decision-making process too long.
• Users had to perform some mental math to figure out how to distribute their 100 chips within and across criteria. 

Safety

Certain combinations of criteria have no restaurant choices

• One group of users decided on Indian food in Chinatown. There were no restaurant choices for these final criteria.

Insufficient feedback for user manipulation

• The app did not inform users that their choices were not saved when they used up all their chips. One user kept betting chips and assumed his choices were being saved. 
• The app displays a list of restaurant choices to vote on before the final voting round to provide users with more information about the restaurants they will choose from. However, some users incorrectly thought that this was a list of final restaurant choices and did not bother to proceed to the final voting round that would generate a single restaurant choice. 

Second Prototype

Learnability

Efficiency

Safety

Prototype Iteration

These are the changes we made between the first and second prototypes:

Redesigned Add Location and Add Criteria screens to improve consistency

Redesigned betting round screens to improve efficiency and understanding of task purpose

• to increase efficiency and improve understanding of task purpose

More signposting and feedback for user manipulation

• Notified user with a popup dialog box when there were no chips left in the bank. 
• Redesigned add-(location, etc.) screens: changed some buttons, labels for clarity
• Restricted users to one choice of location, cuisine, etc., and put the “betting” for all three categories on the same screen (not split across three screens)** One screen for the user to choose his/her favorite for each category; second screen for assigning weights