Jeffrey Chan, Ryan Lacey, Amruth Venkatraman

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


Protoypes

Photos

Navigation Bar

Users can navigate around the site to visit the homepage, give page, get page, messages, and profile.

Give Page

Users upload information on toy(s) they would like to donate. 

"Single" - List each toy individually
"Collection" - Upload a batch of toys as a single item. Items do not have to be related (eg. User could upload dolls and board games as a collection).

Accordion collapsible interface for listing toys. 

Toy Listing Details:

  • Name of toy
  • The age range the toy is appropriate for
  • A description of the toy
  • An image of the toy

Get Page

Users browse offerings and select toy(s) to ask for from other users. 

Toys listing displayed as item picture with name as caption. 

Page Features:

  • Drag & drop interface allows users to drag toy image to cart. 
  • "Quickview" (not shown)  - Popup on picture click that provides detailed toy information.
  • Filters for more powerful and efficient search:
    • Item Name (search bar)
    • Age Range (drop-down)
    • Toy Category (checkboxes)
    • Toy Condition (drop-down)
  • Checkout prompts user to message toy owners to begin the exchange process.

Messages Page

Interface through which users communicate with one another. 

"Recent Contacts" - Listing of people user is in comunication wih. 

Standard messaging interface to allow users to dialogue over contact information, how toy(s) will exchange hands, etc.

Observations

Iteration I

User 1

User 2

User 3

Summary of Iteration 1

Iteration Step

How it changed between iterations:

Iteration 2

User 4

User 5

User 6


Studio Commentary

Q: How does claiming a collection work?
A: The user messages the owner for specific things he sees in the image

Q: What happens if multiple users claim the same toy?
A: The owner of the toy gets requests for his toy and gets to pick who gets the toy.

Q: What happens if the accordion fills the screen?
A: When adding a new toy, the window automatically scrolls to the toy they are trying to add.

Q: What about a message label instead of checkout?
A: That's an idea we considered but decided there is a distinction between messaging an owner of a toy for more information versus actually claiming, so we decided to avoid that.