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• She was annoyed by the fact that we required passwords to be of a certain minimum length.
• After creating a new story, she searched the page for a good 5 seconds before finding where to click to edit the title.
• Used the "edit" text editor to add the first section to the story. While trying to save the changes, clicked "Add section" which brought up the "add section" text editor. She eventually managed to successfully complete the actions, but was very confused by this behavior.  A simple fix for this would be disabling the "edit" functionality when the story is blank.  That solution is probably sufficient, but if users are still confused then we may need to redesign how the "edit" feature looks and is triggered.

Reflections

We learned stuff.

In testing our design on a variety of users, it was surprising to see how different peoples' expectations were very different. For example, in this last round of user tests, a User 2 found clicking on the story text an irritating attribute (she wanted to get out of it quickly), whereas we implemented that functionality because at the paper prototyping stage, many users attempted to click on the text to edit the story. This variety of Although some reactions may be universal, our experience has shown that there can also be much variation in user expectations.

Since our project was focused on giving users a forum to write, we wanted to design an interface that did not interfere with their work. Since the functionality required for each page was simple, we aimed to create a very simple site. This proved remarkably challenging, both practically and aesthetically. Streamlining the user actions required several levels of user testing and heuristic evaluation to design – at every stage, we found that our ‘simple’ arrangement of the buttons and links was confusing to some of the the testers, and would be better placed elsewhere. However, with a simple design as a goal, elsewhere was sometimes hard to find. Similarly, while the layout of our page appears very simple and understated, choosing colour and a layout that neither looked bare nor created unnecessary cognative dissonance took a very long time. In general, however, we did find that simple layouts were helpful for the users, as they could quickly see all the options and possible decisions.