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  • Brief users with following brief:
    Panel

    Collector’s Catalogue allows users to view and organize their collections on the go. By tagging and taking pictures of items, users can keep track of and search their large collections through visual recognition, without having to recall solely from memory.

    Remember that we are testing the application, not you. Feel free to explore, and think your actions out aloud. If you find yourself confused, or wishing for something extra, let us know, and again, feel free to comment out loud with any observations you make.

    This session should be fun, so relax and make yourself comfortable. If at any time you want to stop, you are free to do so. Thank you for taking the time to help us user test the application.

  • Ask users to preform following tasks:
    Panel

    1)      Create a new collection, and add some items with photos and tags.
    2)      Share your new collection with a friend for viewing.
    3)      Starting from the Home screen, quickly search for a crab.
    4)      Delete the “imaginary” animal item, since it doesn’t belong.
    5)      You decide you need some help managing your board games, so you share the collection with a friend, and let them co-manage it with you.
    6)      Go back to the collection you created, and set one of your items to be the collection thumbnail.
    7)      From the Home screen, make a new board game item and add it to the app.
    8)      Finally, you’ve decided that you have too many shoes, so you want to delete your entire shoe collection

...

User testing notes

User Test

Notes

Debriefing and Conclusions

1

Tasks:

  1. From home, clicked on new collection button. Says he’s bad at phone keyboards.
    1. Name: Test collection, Description: This is a test, Tries to push thumbnail image, doesn’t respond
    2. “Maybe I can change it later” (gives the appearance of affordance)
    3. Public/Private/Public/Private (assumes network will do stuff later like use the public/private), clicks done!
    4. Thinks that new item is what he wants, but checks out “edit properties” to see what it does, goes back
    5. Item1, takes a picture of shoe, but shoe doesn’t show up (orientation problem? camera is in landscape mode, problem), assumes just lag, and adds some tags (footwear, white). What’s that blue line (hiddennote: it’s the tag scrollbar)? Has a bit of trouble with keyboard text input, adding spaces. “Probably has fixed space for each tag”
    6. OH HELLO: discovers that the tag gallery scrolls, and the blue line is a scrollbar.
    7. Makes more items. Takes picture of backpack, picture shows up. Thinks maybe he didn’t take a picture of shoe, goes back to take that picture.
    8. “Can I rename the item?” click click click, “Probably not”
    9. Has two items, makes a third Cereal: food, basic, blue
    10. Goes back to shoe: “Picture present, thumbnail obtained” “That’s good”
    11. Tries out filter: “Blue” Yay it filters by tags, oh but not by names, goes back to previous collections screen.
  2. Goes to “Edit properties”, makes it public. Am I done? No.
    1. Tries to figure out what to do. Filter? Menu? Search? Woops (application exits out, usability problem of non-persistence of memory)
    2. (Finds the sharing menu!, in edit properties)
    3. (Finds a bug going from Edit Properties, going back to click on an item, bug crashes!)
    4. “I’ll avoid this bug then”
    5. New Contact! Oh, acces privileges, want View. contact name: meeee
    6. “Done. oh woops that’s a different button” (conflicting affordance)
  3. Tries the hardware search. No response, ok. goes to browse collections, searches for Crab. Oh its in emoticons. A crab! V.v.V, I found it, makes sense! Takes a picture, replaces the crab default picture.
  4. Goes to animal collection. Oh i’m still filtering for crab. Clear’s the filter, oh lochness, click.  How do I delete? (usability, not clear affordance), searches for a delete option. Tries the menu option, oh cool, but it’s not there. Tries to drag and drop, oh so it’s not that.
    1. OH the longtap. longtaps, oh i found it, ok delete the item.
    2. oh, the items are renumbered after I delete.
  5. Ok. games. properties. share menu. adds a friend with edit privileges. pushes cancel. oh woops. does again but with done. Can I see it again. Tries longpress (item space is too small for easy longpress!), edit sharer. What happened (pause) oh it’s on the edit bar again I see (not a clear metaphor) Ok, so add is for editing a current sharer as well (not clear change)
    1. List of sharers awkward
  6. Takes a picture, longpresses it no response, goes to collectionscreen and longpresses the item. Oh found it, hooray I’m done! How do I get out of a context menu without doing anything? ohno, oh the back button (Should have easier optout context).
    1. Oh the name got squished with the picture (consistency usability issue visibility) can’t see item name anymore
  7. Clicks “New Item”. Takes a picture of Risk, tags a few tags. (the + button for adding tags is a little small). Changes collection to Games. Oh wait now the spinner menu is messed up (Animals twice, no games, which its already selected to. bug). Yay you finished!
  8. oh there are a lot of shoes! longpresses the shoe collection, deletes it. Now I have no shoes! (no undo action, what if i want my shoes back, safety problem)

Misc: thumbnail removing seems consistent, when you remove collection selections.
Share menu, the keyboard return item does not respond. “No way to get rid of keyboard? Oh there are ways! swipe, return, etc.”
Debriefing: Desired: Sharing: an easier way to see in the list what their level is. an easier way to do edits.
Long time to figure out how to do long touch
Not sure why the first picture didn’t show up? might have pressed cancel (affordance to say so would be nice)
Can you reorder items? No
Filtering worked as expected! thought it might also filter by name, but ok, might be an option
Adding delete actions to be within items or collections, instead of just as longpress context dependent.
Can’t rename items, would like to.
What is blue bar for? it disappears as a scroll bar, so didn’t understand why it was showing up.

Usability Problems: 

Second

...

Third User Test

...

2

Tasks:

  1. Making a new collection, added name and description, checked out sharing manager. asked if private or public mattered. started a new item, took a picture. started a second item with a picture. Didn’t add tags yet. Goes back to add some tags.
  2. Presses the menu button, accesses sharing from the share menu option. adds a sharer and goes back.
  3. searches crab from the filter, finds the crab emoticon successfully
  4. immediately goes and starts longpressing the animal collection, then going back, and finding lochness and longpressing it, finds the delete option and deletes it.
  5. Adds victoria to the list of sharing manager, used the menu button from the bottom
  6. Tries to click the picture from the item screen, no response. tries the edit properties screen. tries to longpress the thumbnail, no response. “I have no idea.” difficult task. Finally, longpresses the thumbnail item from the collectionview, and sets the thumbnail!
  7. Clicked on “New Item” but didnt make an item there. Instead goes to browse collections, and makes an item directly from the games collection.
  8. Longpresses the shoe collection, and deletes it.

Debriefing: I think it’s pretty simple to use. Does the filter search by tag and text? I don’t think it’s bad to use, I got stuck on trying to set thumbnails for the collection, but other than that I think it’s pretty intuitive! There’s multiple ways of doing a lot of actions, I just noticed I can make a new item from the home screen, but it makes more sense to go from a collection to item, than directly to an item.
The recent items button doesn’t need to be so big? I think it’s easy to use, it could be a little bigger and prettier.

...

3

Tasks:

  • New Collection -> Title - “hello world”, Description - “test collection”, done.
  • New Item -> Title - “room”, Tag - “room” 
  • Take Photo -> Takes a picture of the room
  • New Item -> Title - “desk”, Tag - “desk”, “wood”
  • Take Photo -> Takes a picture of the desk
  • Clicks Item -> “oops” -> back. Clicks Edit -> Share -> Adds “Thomas” to list, clicks on Thomas and presses Notify with Email.
  • First -> Browse -> Animals -> “huh...? no crab...” -> back -> Emoticons -> Crab... “Haha”
  • “Ooooh...” Goes back to Browse screen -> Types in crab in the filter, and clicks on emoticons collection, then on the v.V.v.
  • Browse -> Animals -> Click and hold on Imaginary -> Delete
  • Browse -> Games -> Edit -> Share -> Types in Thomas, changes setting to can Edit -> Add
  • Browse -> hello world -> Click and hold on the desk -> Set as Thumbnail
  • Browse -> Games -> New Item -> “Ohhh....” 
  • Take 2 from Home Screen: New Item
  • Browse -> Click and Hold on Shoes -> Delete

...


When picture is being taken, the Cancel/Retake/Done menu is landscape as opposed to portrait.
When tagging, when you press “+”, and the text box dialog pops up, it would be convenient if the keyboard automatically showed up. Alternatively, there could be suggested tags that you could drag’n’drop into the tag part to add tags.
It would be convenient if there were a quick way to get to the Home Screen instead of pressign back a lot.
No difficulties!
The user liked that there were multiple ways to do each task - it makes it very convenient!

Reflection

  • In general, we found this class highly rewarding to learning about user-centered software design. Though the Spiral Model is frequently preached in other software development classes, only in this class is it truly emphasized. Cheap iterations played a large role in honing out developed UI ideas, preventing us from spending the effort to implement a feature that was not well-received.
  • In the future, one thing I would find particularly useful is another round of paper prototyping, especially evaluating design decisions we were not totally sure about. In user testing stage, we should be more persistent about clarifying what exactly was difficult about a particular task, if any difficulty is found.
  • One very core thing we learned as a team was the discrepancy between the mind of the user and the mind of the designer. Things that were immediately clear to us was not necessarily the case for our users. In this respect, user testing was invaluable. Even our hardest efforts to think from the user's standpoint did not reveal nearly as much as a paper prototype in front of an user.
  • One thing we would change in the future is to draft more realistic paper prototypes. Templating tools have readily available Android UI toolkits, which would easily give us a more realistic paper prototype. This may trade the perceived cheapness of the prototype, but we believe that a prototype that visually looks more similar to an actual app has more perceived affordance than a hand-drawn one.