GR6 - User Testing

Design

A primary design decision we made was to ground the app around user-contributed images, that is, pictures and thumbnails they take and provide of products that they own. This decision, we found, was effective in that it gave users flexibility as to how they wanted specific items organized, and gave users their own mental model of what the images actually were.
Simplicity was a key feature of our prototype -- we received positive feedback from all levels of testing that the simplicity of our user interface made it much easier to use. We were initially afraid that the interface would be too simple in that it would effect learnability; however, a reduced layout actually contributed to learnability and efficiency.
We opted to make collection view laid out with images and with names of the item underneath it. Initially we toyed around with text or image only, but we found during our testing that users responded best when both were available.
A simple, non-obtrusive item adding layout was most effective for our purposes. We feared, initially, that users would find it not revealing enough and would have understanding problems; however, users seemed to pick up fairly quickly on how to add items to their collections.

We chose to implement this software on Android because the picture taking functionality translated best on a mobile application. We utilized the Android SDK, coding primarily in Java. The frontend was handled with Android's own XML view layer. The backend was handled with SQLite databases.
In general, we followed a Model-View-Controller pattern, where the ContentProvider and SQLite abstracted the database information into data models, the XML layer contained the View, and the bulk of the Java code was the controller.