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- The response message for a user signing up mentioned that an error had occurred, whether or not the sign-up was successful. While we had implemented checking for duplicate usernames, as well as successful confirmation of signing up, a bug seems to have broken this behavior.
- Major: but fixable if bug is caught.
- The lack of "submit form on enter" behavior, for the Login form on the index page, lowered users' speed of access for the site because they were forced to use the mouse to navigate to the Login button.
- Minor: add enter-key detection to the password input.
- The "Upload a dress" picture on the Sell page changes the cursor to a hand, indicating that it can be clicked on, but it actually does nothing.
- Cosmetic: we should remove this functionality entirely, as it's misleading.
- The "Upload a dress" picture is unresponsive even after the user has input a legal URL into the "your dress's photo link here" box, making users wonder if their link would be accepted successfully.
- Minor: we can add functionality to the picture so that it changes to reflect the user's typed URL, hopefully displaying an image of the dress.
- One user found the "you will receive __ points_"_ blurb on the Sell Dress page to be confusingly worded, as it didn't indicate clearly how many points would be awarded her, and when.
- Major: we definitely want to either word the description better or write a separate help page for the site. Or we might include a numerical label next to the "Sell Dress for __ points" input, which shows how many points the user would get and changes when the value the user sets is changed.
- One user found the Sell Dress form generally confusing to fill out, as she did not know where to start.
- Minor: perhaps we should change the form to a single column, so that users can fill it out in order.
- Users found the large number of checkboxes in the 'Color' drop-down filters tedious to click through; although one found the "None" option and used it to uncheck all selections, she didn't seem to realize she could use it while searching for dresses of a certain color, and manually unchecked every color except that one.
- Major: we may want to allow users to select color ranges instead of individual colors, or change the filters entirely.
- Users were unable to click on dresses on other users' profile pages, even though they might want to peruse other dresses sold by that user.
- Major: we should be able to link to the clicked-on dress in the Buy page upon clicking on it in a user's profile.
- The page numbers on the Buy and Saved pages, for allowing a user to go through the whole list of displayed dresses, are too low to see. This is a visibility issue.
- Major: users who don't see the page numbers won't realize there are more dresses past the first four, and will be unable to use the site fully. We should move them to above the dresses.
- The "no picture exists for this dress" placeholder image shows up even if no dress data is present, confusing users.
- Minor: this is mostly a bug and can be fixed by checking for dress data.
- One user felt that the provided color, style, and size options were too generic and did not allow her to search dresses based on specific occasions (cocktail party, dance), brand names, or materials.
- Catastrophic: if our provided search filters don't suit the needs of users of our site, they won't come back. We should expand our dress representations to include those options, and our filters to match.
- Users were also somewhat slow to learn the menu's use of "Sell Dress", "Buy Dress", and "Saved Dresses", as they were too similar to each other.
- MajorMinor: since the menu is the primary method of accessing the site's different pages, it ought to be quick to learn. We could change it to "Sell Dress", "Browse Gallery", and "Wishlist" instead.
- The "History" section of the profile page doesn't show bought dresses, making it difficult for users to figure out what they've got.
- Major: there ought to be more info available to users in the profile history, to help users recall what they've bought or not.
- There is no indication anywhere on the site of how long it'll take for the dresses to actually arrive - shipping, etc. No "help" function, either, for people who've forgotten what to do.
- Major: shipping might not be in the scope of this project, but having info about it, and a help page in general would definitely make our site much more accessible to users.
Reflection
First thing learned: problem-oriented, iterative design is hard. Designers can't simply go into the back room and come out with a finished product, but must listen to the input of the people whose problems their design is meant to solve, even if those people's opinions run directly contrary to good principles and reason - or more likely, designer preferences.
It was both fun and mentally exhausting to try to create a design that relied on existing abstractions, so as to be familiar to users, but wasn't so familiar that it was simply a rehashing of already-seen designs. It was also difficult to test such designs in a paper prototype, because a sufficiently unfamiliar interface requires the designer to think very hard about how to represent its parts in such a way that a new user would be able to understand how it works just by poking around. We did not spend enough time testing out how to implement different interfaces, and as such we may have ended up going with the most generic/general designs we could, without innovating enough.
We also learned that it is best not to try to redesign the wheel, especially in a class with limited time such as this. We had what could be generally regarded as an online shopping site, and many of our users took it that way. As such, they expected to see the amenities of an online shopping site, such as a help section, detailed user profiles, verification e-mails, "forgot password?", recommendations, reviews, and more, and as a result they didn't really pay attention to the problem our site was meant to solve, that of exchanging dresses.
Finally, we should have found more users from our target population. That users preferred searching dresses by materials, brand, and occasion is something that we should have been aware of from the start, instead
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of simply guessing the most relevant fields.
Had we more time, and now that we have experience, we will first strive to choose a problem with a solution that could be as different from current commonly-used UIs as possible, then talk more closely with the user population to gauge what sort of solution they would want. Only then should we start designing.
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