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Overall, we did not come across any insurmountable implementation problems that affected our final product. We managed to produce a GUI that was very much as we envisioned it.
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Evaluation via User Testing
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Choice of Users
We chose our four Testers from two main groups, one group being laundry room users at the fraternity two of us live at, and one group being laundry room users from Simmons Hall. We picked users from people that we know, but this should not significantly impact the user set selected. We also made the decision to use only people who already had compatible Android phones. We felt that this decision would ensure test results reflecting our design's internal consistency with the Android platform. If we had been designing for iPhone as well, then we would include iPhone users, but currently our service only has a prototype out for Android users. Our user set should consist of people already owning a compatible smartphone (since one would not buy a smartphone just to help with laundry in communal living places) - thus we chose a user set from known friends who are Android users.
Representativeness of User Set
The users we chose are almost representative of our target population. Both genders and several different races are represented. All the users are in the age range of 18-22, but this makes sense because our target user population is college students in communal living situations who have Android phones. The way in which they are not representative is that all of them are from MIT, which might have specific laundry procedure habits as a school. It would have been more difficult to get users from other schools on a short schedule, but we would do this if we were to take the project forward at other schools.
Our task briefings were pretty similar to our briefings from GRX. One crucial difference is that we installed our prototype application on their phone, instead of using the prototypes we built We did not use a demo as part of our b
Reflections
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