Prototype Photos

(photos go here)

Briefing

Thank you for volunteering to test our ski school scheduler prototype.  Today we will ask you to try to perform several tasks with the paper prototype of the program, and one of us will pretend to be the computer and change the paper prototype as needed.  The overall goal of the system is to help a small ski area manage their instructors.  They normally have about 150 instructors who work 2 to 3 shifts a week each.  Many of the instructors and admins have difficulty using computers.  Each instructor submits a schedule before the season starts, and it must be approved by an admin.  After that, an instructor can request changes, which can be approved or rejected.

Today we will ask you to perform tasks both as an average instructor of the ski area and as an admin.  We’ll clearly indicate which user you represent at any given time.  As an average instructor, you can only view your own schedule and must have schedule changes approved by an admin.  As an admin, you have access to all of the instructors’ schedules and can approve or reject changes.  You can assume that when we tell you which user you represent, you have already logged in with your email and a password to authenticate yourself.  

This particular ski area has three shifts, day, evening, and night, although the night shift is only taught on weekends and holidays.  Instructors are permitted to teach more than one shift in a given day.  They also teach five disciplines, adult ski, adult snowboard, children’s ski, chlidren’s snowboard, and race (ski only), some of which are only taught a certain times.  An instructor can only sign up for one discipline per shift.  Do you have any questions?

[pause for questions]

You will greatly help us improve our interface if you think aloud as you go through the tasks we will give you.  We welcome any and all feedback, so please say anything that comes to mind!

Scenario Tasks

• As instructor, create and submit your initial schedule before the season begins.  You wish to work as a children’s snowboard instructor every Sunday during the day, a racing instructor all Tuesday evenings except December 25, 2012 and January 1, 2013, and an adults’ ski instructor on two Friday nights, January 11, 2013 and February 1, 2013.
• As instructor, request to remove yourself from the schedule for January 20, 2013.
• As instructor, request to add yourself to the schedule as an adults’ snowboard instructor for the evening shift on January 21, 2013.
• As admin, notice that the instructor Sam has requested several schedule changes.  Approve his schedule changes.
• As admin, mark Sam as being excused from his shift on January 13, 2013.  Also mark him as having been absent on December 11, 2012.

Observations

Prototype Iteration

These are the changes made to the paper prototype between the two rounds of testing:

1. Changed “Discipline” to “Select Discipline” text left sidebar to make sure that the user knows they need to select
2. Added modes (crossed out A and crossed out E buttons) to allow the admin to remove Absent/Excused markings.
3. Changed “Clear” to “Remove Shift” to make it more obvious  that it doesn’t clear the entire schedule
4. Changed “Submit” to “Submit Request” on the instructor’s view so that the instructor knows that the schedule must be approved before changes are recorded
5. Add text “You must hit ‘Submit’ to save changes” at the top of the admin view so that they know that changes aren’t saved until they submit.
6. Add text “You must hit ‘Submit Request’ to save changes” at the top of the instructor view so that they know that changes aren’t saved until they submit.
7. Newly added text (in changes 5 and 6) and list of pending changes do not scroll so that user can see this information at all times
8. Approval for pending changes is done with radio buttons with two options (accept or reject) for each pending change, instead of normal buttons, to indicate that nothing is submitted until the admin clicks the “Submit” button. The schedule still updates dynamically as the admin selects the radio buttons.
9. We chose not to add the functionality of selecting all for a given day of the week because we wanted to prioritize safety (i.e. not accidentally selecting all days) over the added efficiency because our user population is not very familiar with computers.  In addition, the only time a user is likely to select all of a given day of the week is when submitting their initial schedule, and this task is only performed once a year.