Table of Contents
Design
Design decisions changed somewhat drastically after each stage of prototyping and user testing.
After early prototyping:
Significant changes were made during this phase of the design. Our prototype was tested by three users. We got the following feedback from our users.
User 1:
- Show current date in the calendar for scheduling a meetup
- Separate date from time. It’s ambiguous. Possibly put it on the next line
- Location field could be a pop-up of map when scheduling an event
- Misspelling a letter might cause a situation
- Also users might not know exact location -> Placeholder should support exact and similar locations
- Default message of invitation helps user to understand he/she is expected to send
- Review meetup. Buttons looked like pictures
- Change history to past events
- Switch upcoming meetings to the left
User 2:
- Accept/Reject Page : Availability is not obvious
- Hitting Calendar for “Meet up”
- Hit’s previous meetups title for meetup
User 3:
- Hit Meetup -> cupcake to review Allen (mistake)
- Hit History title/Review to review => affordance not good.
We made the following design decisions.
- The calendar on the schedule should show the current date. The date should be separated from the time. We kept the location field as a text field.
- We changed history to past events.
- We changed the buttons for the review.
- We switched the position of upcoming meetings on the home page.
After heuristic evaluation:
Our heuristic evaluation turned out to be quite favorable. We consolidated our feedback and the following design changes. We identified the need:
- to standardize photo sizes for consistency in our layout
- to change font for regular text to standard fonts
- to rephrase the "meetup" button
- to standardize the time zone
- for better affordance for review buttons
- to improve the search results page
- to show the previous in the reschedule page
- to show specific confirmation alerts
- to not use a textbox to display date/time on the schedule page
We took this feedback into consideration in finishing up the design of the interface.
After user testing:
Finally the user testing still revealed shortcomings with interface that might have been difficult to perceive earlier. We admittedly did not take every single suggestion into effect in our final design due to time constraints.
Notifications
Up until now the notifications appeared as an icon in the navbar but this was confusing to users and therefore changed.
Previous meetups
Layout should make use of space on the right. Layout should be consistent with other pages.
Invitations
The words “reject” and “accept” on buttons should be written in full.
Navbar
There should be clear navigation to the "Home" page.
Implementation
The website has been tested using Google on the Windows 8 and Mac OSX platforms.
Evaluation
Our user testing involved the following tasks:
Task 1 : Respond to the invitation from 'Lassy'
Task 2 : Search for dogs in Beacon Hill and schedule a meetup with "Cupcake"
Task 3 : Review a previous meetup with 'Allen'
Task 4 : Reschedule the meetup invitation from 'Tony'