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For the persistence layer, we used Ruby on Rails, which unfortunately we were unable to integrate with the frontend.
Evaluation
Briefing:
Campus Connect is a website that helps high school students get more detailed and accurate information about the colleges they are considering through reviews, ratings and photos posted by students currently at the university. High school students can also post questions to ask for specific information they can't find anywhere on the website.
Today we'll be testing our design and we need your help to find the problems with it! We have some short tasks for your to complete. Think out loud as you're completing the tasks so that we can understand your thought process. Also keep in mind, that we're testing our application, not you!
Tasks:
College Student:1.
- Log in
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- Rate MIT
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- Post a review about Party Life
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- Answer a question about Diversity
High School Student:1.
- Log in
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- Find what the student center looks like.
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- Current students think about the party life at MIT is like?
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- Hispanic organizations on campus, already looked through reviews but didn’t find anything
User 1 (College Student):
Female senior at MIT studying Course 3. She is on the Tennis team and in a sorority. She hosts prefrosh very frequently for the tennis team. When she was a senior in high school she was very decided against MIT, until she visited campus for CPW and she understood that MIT was a better fit for her.-
- Wondering why she has to log in through Facebook. Will it post her activity on Campus Connect on her Facebook wall? She suggested there should be a paragraph somewhere on the home page, explaining why she needs to log in.
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- Confused by the “+ Rating” button. She said it would be more clear if the button said ”Rate MIT” or “Add your Rating”
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- When adding her rating, she was confused about what the “Sports” rating was referring to. Was it about the sports culture from a fan’s perspective or the athletic program from an athlete’s perspective? Since at big schools most people aren’t athletes, she assumed it was the first of the two options. She suggested it should be called “Sports Spirit” or “Sports Culture”
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- Said she knew was “+ Review” meant because she saw it when she added the rating, but she suggested we change it to “Add Review”
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- Asked if there was a way to rate review (thumbs up and thumbs down) in case she really agreed or disagreed with a certain review.
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- In the Photo Map section she commented that it was fairly similar to MIT’s campus map but that most schools don’t have a map like MIT’s so this would be really helpful! She also liked that she could look at the map with the satellite view
User 2 (High School Student):
Male senior at Carlsbad high school in San Diego. His high school has 3500 students and is fairly diverse. He wants to study math or engineering. He’s interested in MIT or colleges in California.-
- Liked the Main page because it was very organized. He really liked the rotating pictures and the quick facts since they were really concise.
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- Knew exactly where to go when we read the tasks to him.
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- Found the topic names immediately in the tag cloud view.
User 3 (High School Student):
Female junior at W.T. White high school in Dallas. Over 70% of students are Hispanic and her class has 900 students. She is number 9 in her class and she wants to study engineering. She already went to visit several colleges in the Northeast and she really wants to go into Columbia.-
- Really liked the icons for the ratings, especially the drug culture one
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- She was really interested in reading the quick facts and she said they provided really useful information that was easy to skim over
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- Went directly to the Photo Map tab when asked to find the what the student center looked like
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- When she was looking at the tag cloud in the Student Reviews section she was confused about what the acronyms stood for (UROPs, CPW, etc.)
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- When looking for information about the Hispanic groups on campus, she wasn’t initially sure what topic to look under, so she clicked on the list view in order to see the topic names more clearly