GR6 - User Testing
Design
Implementation
Back-End
The back end of the web site was built using Node.js and Express. In addition, Socket.io was used to build the event driven portion of the app, mainly the Question Queue. The database used was Postgresql, interfacing via the 'pg' module.
Front-End
The front end of the web site was built using HTML, CSS, and Javascript at its core. However, many frameworks were involved. For one, the javascript was served using Embedded Javascript (EJS), which is a templating system. In addition, Jquery Mobile was heavily used, which provided us nice ajax animations and mobile widgets. The decision was made because we figured the biggest use case was on a mobile phone. Other frameworks include Swipe.js for the Stats page, and jquery-rate-it for the stars on the feedback page.
Evaluation
To evaluate our implementation of the ConnecTour UI, we crashed a tour being conducted on Monday and asked three tourists to test our interface. The three users we found to conduct this round of user testing were tourists, although they were unfortunately not all prospective college students. Early on in this project, we determined that our target user population would be what we called "story tourists": prospective students who were interested in hearing specific and detailed stories from college students about what the college was like. However, as it was already hard enough to find students who were prospective students, let alone "story tourists," our user population was the closest we could find to our desired target population.
Our user test was conducted on the user's mobile device on some modern browser (e.g. Chrome, Safari, etc.). The users were given the briefing and tasks to do below.
Briefing
Problem:
Our group is trying to solve the following problems for college tourists:
- College tourists often have trouble finding campus events/activities, accessing current students for more specific inquiries.
- Tour Guides tend to spend time repeatedly answering common questions from tourists which detracts time from the tour.
Goals:
Our goals for the ConnecTour UI are the following:
- Find out about events on campus
- Facilitate interaction between tour guides and tourists
- Facilitate student-tourist interactions
- Find out about general stats/frequently asked general questions easily
Information about you, the user:
- You are a prospective student at CollegeTech University using the application as a tourist.
- You are about to check in/go on a tour at the university.
Tasks
- Check in to a tour and Ask a question to the tour guide.
- Find out the percent of undergraduates that are African-American at the University.
- Find a greek related event happening today or tomorrow.
- Find a story relevant to business school and schedule a meetup with a student who wrote a story.
- Leave feedback for your tour guide.