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.

Group meeting 3/11

Since last time we've continued to work separately with the design of different aspects of the app following some main guidelines we worked out together. Today we had a long session with all members present were we all sat down nearly completed our click-able prototype of Bubble. Based on our individual work, our thoughts and the feedback from our fellow group B5, we've compromised and come up with an interface and lay-out that we all can agree on. For example, there is now a consistent banner on the app that helps the user navigate. We've continued to work on consistency in the app in how the user navigates in the app.

We will soon test our prototype on users (think-aloud) that never have been in contact or heard of Bubble. By observing and taking notes based on how they experience our prototype and how they navigate through the interface as a first time user, we'll obtain vital data on how to perfect our app.

The following days we'll complete our think-aloud's and together discuss if there have been any patterns or issues that multiple users have shown and what we can learn from that.

Here are some screenshots of what a profile will look like.           

We redesigned the group interface and added a banner at the top.

Group meeting 30/10

Today only Mathias, Anton and Emil could attend the meeting.

Since last time we've worked separately with the design of different aspects of the app following some main guidelines we worked out together. This is the first meeting since, and since the deadline for these separate designs has not yet run out, only Mathias and Emil could show their designs. We decided that we could work from them together to flesh out our design even more before designing the last bits of the app.

Right now we're focusing mainly on the interface and the layout of the app, we chose to work mainly in the mockup-program called Balsamiq.

We showed each other our thoughts on the interface and layout for the different windows of the app. We're designing for the iPhone platform and try to stay true to the standard conventions in designing for that platform.

We've worked hard on enforcing consistency in the app, especially in how the user navigates in the app, where buttons are placed and what they do as well as keep a uniform color scheme throughout.

Another important aspect we've worked on is the main flow of the app, and much thought has been put into response when interacting with the app so the user will always feel like the app is responding to every user decision.

During the meeting we discussed and reinvented the design we had largely according to our own experiences of what makes an app good to interact with and with motivations from Fitts´s Law to make interaction as effecient as possible.

We also decided to do a small evaluation before our "think-aloud", so we used the Heuristic evaluation method to test our current design. We were positively suprised to see how many of the points we actually had considered during our main design process.

Here are some screenshots of parts of our mockup showing the initial tutorial/help and the main group interface. The second last picture demonstrates what happens when a bubble is pressed (it expands and shows an overview of relevant information about the group) and the last shows what happens if the expanded bubble is pressed, which is moving into a more detailed group view.

Group meeting 16/10

Today we had a group meeting where we evaluated group B5s project and discussed reflections and thoughts on their project and ideas. It was fun to get a bigger view and insight on an other groups project and it gave us some perspective of how to think when we design our own project.
During the meeting we also brainstormed about some good names and slogans for our project where one of the most popular name ideas was "Bubble".
We also made a very simple prototype of our product by drawing the interface on a whiteboard to get a good overview of how we might want the product to look.
The next step for us now is to make a simple prototype app in css/html so that we can get a good perspective of how we want to make the design even better.

  

Group meeting 6 october 2014

Today we prepared for exercise 5 and continued to brainstorm on our concept ideas while trying to come up with new ones. We made some progress by discussing and trying to visualize our different ideas. In our visualisation process we used photoshop to gain an idea of what our different design concepts would look like. The idea that is the most interesting idea for us at the moment is an idea that we call MuseumPool(BUBBLA!!...???!). The idea is that people that do not have anyone to go with can find people with similar interests and problem of finding somebody to go with. The service will provide an easy to use interface where you easily can find somebody to meet up with and share the experience with. Our current design is some kind of bubbly interface where each bubble represents a person and different colour schemes depending on availability. The bubbles size indicate match of interest, a big bubble means a good match.

Secondary Persona - Lena Johansson

Secondary Persona

Name:            Lena Johansson 

Age:               34

Hometown:   Stockholm, Sweden

Background

Lena is born and raised in Stockholm. She works at Blackeberg Gymnasium as a curator; a job she really enjoys as she thinks that she can make the students lives better. Lena currently lives alone in a small apartment near Kristineberg but dreams about meeting the right man to have children and start a family with.

 Lena has a lot of female friends that she hangs out with. The highlight of the year is when Melodifestivalen starts and they all gather to watch and talk about it. They also travel together once a year with charter to spend time together.

Personality

Lena is a very social person, she loves to meet and get to know new people. She always has a smile on her lips and she finds it easy to laugh at almost everything. However, she has difficulties in finding a life partner. She has had some problems with relationships previously in her life and has a hard time to commit to someone.

 Sometimes her work can be stressful and overwhelming. When this happens Lena usually has a hard time handling those situations when they occur. To prevent this, Lena tries to be as structured as possible in her work, though she’s not the great planner she thinks she is.

Today

Every morning Lena reads the morning paper to keep up with the information flow in the society. She sees herself as fairly well informed about culture and the society and she thinks it’s important to have knowledge that is up-to-date. Lena is also a frequent user on facebook, though she doesn’t post so much. She mostly follows friends and looks up pages of things that she thinks is interesting. Her phone is her second source of finding information.

Since Lena has difficulties in finding a boyfriend, she is using some dating sites and applications to try to meet her life partner, but she thinks that it’s hard to find new places to go to; it gets monotonous to always go to a restaurant or a café. Lena wants to get a more active lifestyle as well as extend her common knowledge about everything she finds interesting. She wants to meet someone who she can share her thoughts with, as her friends doesn’t share her interest in more deeper discussions, rather than to talk about plain gossip.

State-Of-The-Art Analysis by Emil

Tekniska Museet - Usability on Webpage
I'm going to try to do a state-of-the-art analysis of the Tekniska Museum webpage. First, I'm briefly going to analyze who the target group is for the webpage, and who actually uses it. Second, I'm going to analyze what worked well, and what didn't work well based on my own experience and based on a test with assigned tasks I asked a testperson to do. Last, I will present the tasks and results that I assigned to the testperson together with screenshots of the website.

Who is the target group for the webpage?
From what I understand from using the webpage myself, it’s relatively easy to find basic information of the museum, such as opening hours, prices, exhibitions and so on. It’s harder to find what else this page contains, such as questions you can ask to the staff, and information about, for example, inventors.

  Therefore I believe that the target group the developers had in mind for this page probably is a medium technical skilled person, a person that is used to more interactive webpages and links. It’s probably persons between ages 15-50 that can find information from the website with ease the first time they visit them since I assume that these people use highly interactive technology daily.

Who is using the webpage?
Those who actually use the webpage are probably, for the most part, parents with small children and maybe teachers who's looking for information about visits from schools. I would imagine that the former has more experience in using these kind of website, and that the latter are having a harder time with the webpage. (Presumably because I think that they for the most part are older and non technical...). I also think that the people in the target group fits into the users of the webpage, though the youngsters might use the app instead or as a compliment.

What is working well on the site?
There is easy access to most of the site in just a few clicks! The top menu is the shortcut to almost everything that possibly would want to find. This was proved in the test I did with a test person.
  The front page is presenting all the relevant information that you need, though there is a lot of links and pictures which could drag attention and confuse the user from concentrating on his/hers assigned tasks.

What is working bad?
Things that is not working well on the page is the search function which isn’t presenting the results in a clear way. The user has to scroll down on the resulting page to find more results than the two that are shown directly after the search. This wasn’t obvious the first time I and my testperson used the search function.
  Another thing, which I discovered from the test tasks, is the questions that you can ask to a specific exhibition. The design here is clearly not thought through and it was hard to see where the questions were, and where the user could ask a question himself.
  The font and the titles on some pages made it hard to see what and when information was presented, as in the example with the exhibition questions.
  Also, as the test showed, the top menu wasn't designed for a small computer screen like mine. There was no indication that you could scroll down on the extended menu to get more accessible links. You can see picture examples of this in the task test below.

Tasks for the test person:
1. Find the opening hours.
This task was easy. The test person found the opening hours in just two clicks. There was a direct link from the top of the webpage, but hidden in the top menu. It can be accessed as shown in the picture. (The opening hours is displayed at the bottom of the page at all times, so you can always scroll down to find them.)




2. Find future exhibitions.
This task was also relatively easy for the test person to achieve. She found a link for this information from the same top menu as the opening hours could be accessed . See picture above (link is down to the left).

3. Find the GAME ON exhibition and write them a question.
As previously, the test person put the mouse over the “Besöka” button on the top menu to get the extended options for that choice. When you click on “Utställningar” you get to this view:



She then clicked on the GAME ON picture to get to the GAME ON exhibition, and the view changed to this:



After some trouble, she managed to find the questionnaire at the bottom of this page. But it was hard to see when the questions started and that the text you saw actually was user generated questions. In the picture below the user generated questions can be seen at the bottom.



It was a long scroll down until the questionnaire showed up, and this was hard to understand for user due to the design of this page.

4 Find information about swedish inventors.
This task showed to be the most difficult one. This was probably due to a design problem on the extended view from the top menu.
  This is how the menu looks like when you move the mouse over the “Veta mer” button at the top:



As you can see, the menu doesn’t show swedish inventors. But if you scroll down while keeping the mouse on the extended menu, you’ll notice that there are more clickable options on this menu. One of those is directing you to the swedish inventors page. It took some time until the test person found out that this was possible. Instead of scrolling down on this menu she tried to search for “svenska uppfinnare”. The search result presented the link “svenska uppfinnare” as the third result, which was not presented until you scrolled down on the webpage.



(this is the search result for “svenska uppfinnare”. The link to the page “svenska uppfinnare” is just below the second result visible on the screen. The test person did scroll down, but didn’t see the link. She continued to search for the inventor page using different links and methods for a while until she noticed that it was accessible in the “Veta mer” menu as described above.)

5. Can you buy food at the museum?
This task was also easy for the subject to find. It was accessible from the top menu and she arrived to the right page in just 2 clicks.

6. Can you buy SL-tickets at the museum?
The last and final task went smoothly aswell. She first went to the Ticket page, but here there was only information about the museum tickets. She then went to the “Hitta hit” page where there was information about the museum selling SL-tickets. This information is also presented in the “Butik” page but the user never thought of going there.

/ Emil

Interview by Emil 22/9 -14 at Tekniska Museet

Interviewee: Woman, 25-35 years, not from Stockholm. Didn’t want to be audio recorded.

How often do you visit a museum?
- ”Very rarely, once a year perhaps.”

Why do you visit a museum? What is it that appeals you to visit?
- ”Wow.. what a difficult question! I don’t really know..”

Is it more fun to visit a museum if there are more interactive things, like there are here at GAME ON?
- ”Yes, this exhibition (GAME ON) made me come here because there are a lot of games, and I guess that’s it’s more fun when the exhibition is as interactive as it is here. But it depends a lot on the exhibition.

Can you think of something that would make you visit a museum more often?- ”Ehh, that depends.. I don’t know.”

Do you visit by yourself or in a group?- ”It varies from time to time, but today I’m here alone.”

Could you imagine using your phone in an interactive way, when you’re at the museum?- ”Yes, probably, if it were something that really enhanced the experience; maybe to get more information or something like that. But otherwise I don’t think I would.”

Do you have any special memory from a visit to a museum that’s more prominent than others? If you do, then why?- ”Difficult question.. I visit museums so rarely so I don’t know. I’m happy with the GAME ON exhibition, this visit gets more fun when you are allowed to interact with things.”

/ Emil