Thursday, November 6, 2014

Group meetings 5/11 and 6/11

Thinkalouds
We all did our think-alouds separately and let different people test our prototype and give feedback on what they thought about it. We all found it quite challenging to be a quiet observer while somebody else was testing the prototype and we all had to focus hard to not give help or advice to the person doing the testing.


After doing the thinkaloud sessions separately we all gathered and discussed our conclusions in the group. We could see a few similarities in the feedback that we all got but there were also remarks that not all of the testers had thought about.
The most common remark was that our bubble interface is hard to understand and not so clear. The testers thought that it wasn´t entirely clear what each bubble contains. It is hard to get a good view of a bubble if you only see an image of a museum on the bubble. It might be more clear to have the name of the museum as text for an example. We all agree about this remark and it is our main focus when re-designing.

Another thing that some users pointed out during the think-alouds was that it was hard to navigate through the acquaintances part of our app, though some of our testers found it very intuitive and navigated through it quite effectively. Some found that it was hard to know wether the people under my acquaintances were the users acquaintances or people that could be added as acquaintances. We decided to label that window "My acquaintances" so this would be clear to future users. There were a few other parts of the app that were difficult to navigate through like finding the chat in a joined group and navigating in the “my bubbles” section.

One tester thought that all the confirmation-popups after making an action (for example creating a bubble) were unnecessary and that it can be irritating for the experienced user to always have to confirm your actions. This was something that only one of the testers thought about but we think that it's certainly a valid point.

Another user gave us the feedback that the tutorial for the app could be displayed before the user registers a profile instead of afterwards so that the user can get an idea of how the app works before deciding to create an account.

We all agree that the think-aloud sessions have been very useful and that we have gotten some great feedback from it. We realise more and more that we have designed our prototype using the genius-design mindset. We want the app to be as user-friendly as possible and we want it to be easy to interact with. We are going to use all the feedback that we got from the thinkalouds to make our app more intuitive for the user. We have already implemented some changes to make the bubble interface more straightforward and intuitive. We've limited the number of bubbles on the group screen to be seven, according to the essay “the magical number seven, plus or minus two” by George Miller which states that the human brain has a hard time processing more than seven elements at a time. We have also changed the appearance on the bubbles to make it more clear what the bubbles contain and focused more on using icons instead of text. Another change that we have made is that we have added another element to the menu to make it easier to navigate through the app.

                                       New interface                    Before the thinkalouds

To conclude we've included some of the strong and weak points of our app.

STRONG POINTS
1. The users have a lot of power over how they want to make the visits, so they don't feel restricted.
2. It's a cool and easy way to meet new people.
3. You learn new things both from visiting the museum and from meeting new people
4. The layout is familiar and has similarities with other popular apps, so it's easy to use.
5. It's easy to use the app to find new museums in the area and you can find relevant information about the museums.

WEAK POINTS
1. The solution is not optimal for our main persona and our target group (we have deviated a bit from their requirements)
2. The solution demands a pretty high amount of people actively using the app for it to work properly.
3. It demands a certain form of social commitment to be used properly. There may be a too high social threshold for some people.
4. Some people may not return to the app after using it a couple of times. Apart from meeting new people and interacting with them, there isn't that much value to be had.

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