...
We came up with two hypothetical personas that we gave to our users so they could get in the correct mindset while using our site. The first persona is a college student who is new to Photo Circle and wants to create a new circle to share photos with friends. This person was asked to perform tasks 1, 2, and 6. The second persona was a college student who was added to a circle and wanted to view newly posted photos in the circle. This person was asked to perform tasks 3, 4, and 5.
Observations
The main problem we found was that some of our users were confused because we did not have a concept of albums in our site. We had to explain that instead, we just had circles of friends that you shared photos with. We decided to disregard albums because we wanted a lack of hierarchy, allowing us to maintain simplicity in our site. When we debriefed our users, some of them liked the simplicity after it was explained, seeing that it was very similar to the way Google Docs lack hierarchy and require emails to be added each time a new document wants to be shared. However, some people preferred having hierarchy, thinking that it was more organized if under the umbrella of circles, albums could be made to further organize photos.
We noticed that most people were very comfortable dragging and dropping photos into albums, and found it intuitive that they could select many photos to drag into the window. However, one user asked what would happen if you dragged a photo on top of another photo, specifically where that photo would be placed. The user was also confused why there wasn't a finish button. Even though adding automatically finishes once uploading of dragged photos is done, we noticed that users like having a button for confirmation.
We also noticed that nobody tried to rearrange or delete photos. We didn't give these specific instructions because we wanted to see if it was obvious that this could be done, but we realized we needed a better affordance so users knew it could be done.