GR6: User Testing

Design

Final Design of Interface (screenshots)

Key design decisions and alternatives considered

as motivated by paper prototyping, heuristic evaluation, and user testing

Implementation

Internals and important design decisions.

Implementation problems that may have affected the usability of the interface

Evaluation

Setup

Users were found through personal contacts: architect, digital artist, art professor at School of the Museum of Fine Arts. They are representatives of our target populations.

User briefing and tasks:

Artists' briefing
"You are requesting feedback about a digitized visual art work that you have been working on. You use ArtBark to collect tangible, actionable feedback to improve your art piece. This comprises two stages that are separated in time: 1) uploading the work and requesting the customized feedback from specific individuals and 2) browsing through the feedback after it has been received."

Artists' tasks

• Setup the review process: upload art, select groups of commenters, and categories/tags desired for the review
• Review comments/annotations from commenters; Filter by categories (tags) and by groups

Commenters' briefing

"Your feedback about a visual art work is being solicited. You want to help the requester improve the art piece you are about to see."

Commenters tasks:

• Put general comments and editing, categorize them through tagging
• Put annotations directly picture, and edit them, categorize them through tagging
• Rate the art

We decided not to do a demo, not to bias the learnability of the interface.

Usability problems found and potential solutions

Both commenter and artist view:

• Poor contrast between pins and image
• Pins icons on comments
• Hard to see hashtags: could have them as blue links that are the filter
• Red border around annotation on the right looks like input field on error

Commenter review:

• Empty stars are not very visible
• Feedback/confirmation on deletion
• Change mouse marker to indicate draggable
• Expect double click to edit annotation
• Cannot close annotation window if you change  your mind

Reflection

Learning through iterative design process.

Risk assessment, decisions about what features to prototype, and which prototype techniques to use, and how to evaluate the results of observations