Group Design Project 8
From VMT
- Return to Designing Social Interaction Software
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[edit] Instructions
- This week, each group should conduct cognitive walkthroughs of their own interaction designs, using the prototypes and scenarios posted in week 6. You may revise these and post them below on this page to make them more suitable for the cognitive walkthrough. You may want to sketch a series of prototyped screenshots showing the interface at different steps, share them in the wiki, and print them out to show to your subjects.
- Cognitive walkthroughs are most easily conducted face-to-face. Therefore, each group member should find a "subject" and walk them through the scenario. Select a subject who is computer literate, but who has not studied HCI. Explain the background of the VMT system and lead them through the scenario. Try to have them "talk aloud" about their experience -- what they are thinking as they decide what to do, what buttons to press, what words in the interface might mean, etc.
- When each member has done a walkthrough, the group should compare notes and summarize what they have learned about their interface from the walkthrough and the heuristic evaluations.
[edit] Comments on Group Statements
It seems that all groups learned a considerable amount from their walkthroughs. In particular, it opened up a critical perspective for thinking about how to improve the design. Even some groupware interaction issues came out, like the problem of scaling up to a larger user group and differentiating buddies from others.
It will be interesting to see your final designs and how they respond to what you learned in the walkthroughs.
[edit] Team A Statement
- Members: Elizabeth, Brian, Olivia
- Date and Time of posting: Olivia 21:28, 29 May 2007 (EDT)
[edit] General Description of Design
VMT sync is an interactive forum designed to allow students the opportunity to do basic scheduling and blogging, all within the same application as the VMT TabbedChat. It has a basic 7-day scheduler that acts as a meeting planner and notifier. It includes profile viewing, blogging, and chat features. The following scenarios will elucidate this protoype description.
[edit] Feedback/comments from users
- Too many users can change the time of meetings...this flexibility of rescheduling would only work with small groups, but not for large groups where there would be too many time conflicts to come to an agreement.
- VMT Sync should include some feature on the VMT sync to indicate deadline of assignments
- Responses should be threaded. They thought the sequential responses could be confusing if they were not threaded. There should also be a way to tell if the posting was "read" or "un-read" for tracking purposes.
- Meeting times should also include some information about approximate meeting "end time". One or two discription so meeting can be distinguished from each other on the calender.
- User commented that they use a similar software called the Kiva.org which provides scheduling capability for meetings and project deadlines. He suggested that a Gaant chart be included for enhanced scheduling robustness.
- One user was confused by the name "Sync". Perhaps a name such as "Scheduling" or "Meeting calendar" would have been more intuitive. On the other hand, another solicited user understood without being told that the calender Tab would bring all member together or synchronize them. That particular user was impressed by the name selection.
- Solicited user suggested expanding the calendar to a larger scale (maybe include an entire month), but for the purposes of this class we agreed that a one-week time-span would be most ideal. If the group worked on month-long or semester-long projects, perhaps a longer time scale would be more appropriate. Another user agreed with one week so some detail can be seen at a glance, but would like to see the month calender by just a "click".
- User was confused by purpose of blogging functionality...thought this complicated the design. Perhaps this functionality should be included on a separate tab called "Blogging". Another user stated that blogging is new stuff but not too complicated.
- User commented that instructions or a quick tutorial could be helpful, as it wasn’t completely straightforward what needed to be done from the interface alone.
- Also user suggested putting the entire date rather than just the day of the week, which would make it easier for teammates to schedule meeting times.
- User stated that there were not enough instructions, so new user could learn quickly. However I think I had this same problem with the VTM collaboration tool itself. Not everyone knows that they are suppose to investigate the site and they don't want to do something that makes them look bad.
[edit] Clarification
- The meeting times can be changed by double-clicking on the day tab. This will then open up a box that allows users to update the meeting time.
- Title or Subject of meeting statement are needed so group members cam see different meetings types when there are more then one meeting to distinguish.
[edit] Conclusion
Users were able to grasp the concept easily enough, but had trouble figuring out exactly how "Sync" works. Overall user thought the Sync idea was a good one. It just needed some flushing out. From their comments and feedback we would agree that Sync needs to be more fully developed and revised to better meet the users' needs.
[edit] Team C Statement
- Members Ben, Kevin
- Date and Time of posting
Ben 09:48, 28 May 2007 (EDT)
Group statement on project. Group Design Project:
There were three points brought up to use by our subjects about our proposed changes to VMT.
1: Insert a disclaimer into the sign up page for VMT after the Email address that would say that VMT would not give out your address to other users of the system. The email address is only for VMT to contact you or to forward to you copies of VMT mail sent to you across VMT.
2: Move the placement of the question for what timezone the user is in from the bottom of the page to near the country and preferred online time to make the flow more logical. That would make the question flow: Country, Time Zone, Preferred online meeting time.
3: Instead of having the math interests entered by the user provide a list of the most popular 20 or 30 topics that a user could pick from then have an addition place for more interests that users could type in. That would make sure that the users didn't describe the same topic in different ways. If this was also carried over into the search page then the improvement would also help there.
General improvements to VMT from our subjects:
1: One of the features of our proposed project is the addition of a friends feature to both a user's profile and our proposed search results page. The friends feature would allow users to have a more direct line of communication to those who have similar mathematical interests. User's could invite frequent group members to be their friend, and the names of a user's friends would be displayed in their user profile.
2: A useful feature for the VMT would be a link between a user's profile name, as listed in the profiles section, to their actual profile. That way users could quickly determine what groups a potential group member belongs to and what their interests are. This would also further strengthen our proposed search feature, as users will be able to more quickly determine if a user's friends will also be likely to be potential group members.
[edit] Team D Statement
- Members: Eric, Bertha, Kate, Rajeev
- Date and Time of posting: Bertha 20:08, 24 May 2007 (EDT)
Reactions from users
- Concerned with privacy issues, is cell phone number a necessity?
- Concerned with cost.
- Receiving a flood of emails.
- Interface design was not user friendly.
- Lack of help information.
- Small screen on phone may not be readable.
- Copy and paste in cell small screen especially problematic.
- Internal email system only, can other emails (yahoo or ?) work?
Based on the Usability Heuristics our enhancement rates high on the match between the system and the real world. Our enhancement follows the rules of a typical email program which users are already familiar with providing an ease of use and allows for the user to be flexible in what email program they prefer.
We lack the design of a conventional error system. We also lack any help system to recover from the errors be it system or user errors.
However as the germ of an idea the system has interesting possibilities and capabilities. It is also capable of extending itself into other tools and web applications through the use of the universal communication tool : email.
The extension will also allow impaired persons access to conversations using accessibility enhancing tools like braille readers and read-aloud software. This is currently not possible with conversations that occur in VMT.
[edit] Team E Statement
- LisaG, Dave, Seth & Fernando
- Seth E 23:30, 28 May 2007 (EDT)
[edit] Cognitive Walkthrough of Week 6 Interactive Prototype
Subjects Interviewed
- 31 year old school female school teacher.
- 12 year old female student.
- 38 year old male school teacher.
- 28 year old male student.
Positive Feedback from Users
1. Easy to drop down the box and select state.
2. Easy to understand.
3. Clear title - student knew which chat room they were in.
4. Pleased with the visibility of state.
Issues/Areas for change
1. "Active" was ambiguous - confusing; more accustomed to the word "online".
2. Need categories like "buddies" and "family".
3. Need categories differentiating between buddies, people in the group who are not buddies, and people in the same school.
4. Need sound alerts when people leave and return.
5. If the user is idle for certain time period, their status can be set to auto-away. A sound file can be activated to warn the user to return.
Explication:
The reactions of the users helped us: by means of a simple cognitive walkthrough we were able to isolate the design areas that needed the most attention. The prototype was an unexpected success. By ameliorating our design with the suggestions of the interview subjects, we were able to evolve the heuristic analysis of the group that analyzed our project on week 7.
