GR6 - User Testing

Design

Describe the final design of your interface. Illustrate with screenshots. Point out important design decisions and discuss the design alternatives that you considered. Particularly, discuss design decisions that were motivated by the three evaluations you did (paper prototyping, heuristic evaluation, and user testing).

Implementation

The main software used for the development of this project is Flex (Adobe Flash Builder). This includes xml along with the GUI builder for designing the website and Actionscript for handling the changes in the design

and for connecting the website with the Database.

The Database used is based on the MySql provided by the scripts.mit.edu and the middle man between our application and the Database is php.

Using Flex (instead of HTML/Javascript) was a major important decision, since we hadn't used it in class and only 1 of the 3 members knew it already. However, it was very easy to learn and, most importantly, the GUI Builder

makes the design part a lot more convenient and easy to handle. Connecting it to the back-end was indeed more tedious than it is with regular Javascript, but - fortunately - no real problems appeared and the interaction between back-end and front-end is fast and smooth.

This implementation decision affected the usability of our interface positively, since we had a great variety of gadgets to select from and the way you can simply drag and drop gadgets and position all the elements exactly where you want, allowed us to design the website to exactly match our paper prototype.

Evaluation

Describe how you conducted your user test. Describe how you found your users and how representative they are of your target user population (but don't identify your users by name). Describe how the users were briefed and what tasks they performed; if you did a demo for them as part of your briefing, justify that decision. List the usability problems you found, and discuss how you might solve them.

User 1

User 2

User 3

Reflection

Discuss what you learned over the course of the iterative design process. If you did it again, what would you do differently? Focus in this part not on the specific design decisions of your project (which you already discussed in the Design section), but instead on the meta-level decisions about your design process: your risk assessments, your decisions about what features to prototype and which prototype techniques to use, and how you evaluated the results of your observations.