The following studies were developed at 213 course, User Interface
Design, with the participation of one of the SFnight team members,
and Rosa Ren, Bin Xin and Hong Cai. SFnight 213 team focused its
studies primary on personalization and customization of information
related to consumer needs. Besides the deployment of two usability
testings and analysis of the heuristic evaluation performed by
BESS team (Shirley Chan, Susanne Eklund, Mary Trombley), 213 team
also contributed with their own evaluations and ideas, and performed
quick and simplified testing of the customized features at all
stages of the prototype development.
The purpose of SFnight in providing personalization and customization
features was to highly enhance the experience of frequent SFnight
visitors. As we went through several interactions with potential
users, testers and instructors feedback, our motivations for providing
customization capabilities got stronger.
The goal of 213 team was to create a seamless and high quality
experience for each visitor. We have learned that getting users
involved at various stages of the design process is key to creating
and developing usable systems. The two performed usabilty testings
helped us to validate or repudiate some design choices, as well
as to get new ideas that were incorporated into the prototype
or were listed for further development.
The following features of SFnight were study object of 213 usability
testings:
"Add to a list to E-mail Friends", which is
personal lists to help any user planning events.
The registration process, and its challenge of overcome
with user-resitance to give away personal information
The customization of MySFnight page, and the user's manipulation
of its two event calendars.
We performed three evaluations regarding these features, in different
stages of our design: one usability testing on the low-fi prototype
stage, a heuristic evaluation on the first interactive prototype,
and another usability testing on the third interactive prototype.
Usability Testing I: Low-fi Prototype
The purpose in testing on paper-based prototype, also called
low-fi prototype, was to help us to quickly gain a good understand
of the desired interactions and information/features needed to
accomplish the predefined tasks. Three subjects participated on
our test, and were selected to match our personae and target audience
as closely as possible. Ranging from 21 to 45 years old, all three
enjoy going out to bars and clubs, sometimes for various events.
Since our ultimate target customers are Internet/web savvy, we
also looked for relevant experience from our testers. All three
testers have been using the Internet for more than five years,
and all have used entertainment sites such as Sfgate and Citysearch.
However, only one tester has created a personalized page with
websites such as MyYahoo.
Besides having discovered some unexpected bugs, and gained some
insights as well ideas for potential solutions, this experience
helped prove the value and importance of doing testing in the
early stage of the design: easy to change and low cost.
This testing point out problems on labeling the "Add to
my list" feature, confusion between "Add to MySFnight"
and "Add to My List", and problems with the initial
design concept for MySFnight.
View full report at Low-fi
Prototyping and Usability Testing
Creating
the prototype [images]
Lo-Fi
Prototype and Usability Testing [images]
Spring 2001, 213 SFnight Team
Heuristic Evaluation: 1st Interactive Prototype
BESS team members (three colleagues from User Interface Design
course) performed expert heuristic evaluation for the second interactive
prototype, focused on customization features. The second 213-interactive
prototype was a hybrid interface comprising the old prototype
of SFnight (epub), mock up pages, and the new designs, related
to 213 project. At this stage our final project was under complete
revision, based on the results of a new survey designed for frequent
nightlife consumers, and the new interface and features were not
ready to be integrated into this evaluation.
The evaluation used The
Heuristics Evaluation Guidelines reproduced from Nielsen's
list, and applied a severity rating scheme. The testers were not
aware of the different versions integrated into this interface,
and pointed out problems that were not under the scope of our
testing. The fact that this interface was a evolve design, inconsistencies
due to version control also interfered in the heuristic evaluation
results. Besides this, BESS team was able to give us relevant
feedback, and address problems that helped us to refine our design
solutions, mostly related with:
Language and labeling issues
Feedback pos user interaction
Inappropriate use of check boxes (O.D’d designer)
Unclear selection process on MySFnight.
We not only incorporated most of their suggestions and critics
into our new interactive prototype design, but also reviewed our
(Final Project team) feedback process in the entire site, including
the Network.
View full report Global
Violations and Individual Pages Violations
This report includes BESS team evaluation and our discussion about
the violations. Spring 2001, 213 SFnight Team
Usability Testing II: 3rd Interactive
Prototype
The third Interactive Prototype integrated the evaluators's input
into the new interface of SFnight Final Project, and represented
substantial prototype development and implementation. Now the
front-end user interface was connected to the backend MySQL database
using PERL CGI developed by Yisong Chen.
Our purpose on this usability testing was to ensure that the
overall design efforts accomplished the goals of creating a usable
system, to again validate or repudiate our designs choices, and
help us to find possible solutions to problems related to MySFnight
page.
Three volunteer participants whose profile closely matched the
project personas each completed the same benchmark tasks and followed
up tasks surveys. Also two of them have been working and researching
in human-computer interaction field and performed research on
personalization features.
As result from this evaluation, we made the following changes
in the current prototype:
List to E-mail Friends
"Add to E-mail List" was changed to "Add to a
list to E-mail Friends". After analyzing several suggestions
we agreed this change would better translate the task process.
"Direction" was added in the set of information to
be send to friends, to address needs of visitors or users who
don't know SF well.
We decided not to implement a feature to store friends's address
at SFnight. This idea has been discussed since our first lo-fi
prototype, and for privacy issues we decided not to develop
it. But we will analyze in the future the option of providing
it with some explicit privacy policy/warning in place. And users
could choose whether or not they want to use it.
Sign UP Process
To address problems of Sign Up, we included a link "Not
a Member" under the Sign In section and made a small change
in the design.
To address the feedback page requested by two users, we created
a Thank You page, which also present an overview of MySFnight,
and changed the sign up process, giving users the option to
go back to the Homepage or to visit MySFnight:
 |
MySFnight
We changed MySFnight button at the navigation bar, to make it
more like a button, as suggested by one of our testers. The
current solution is not yet the ideal one, but sign our intention
of addressing this problem. We plan to study other solutions
to communicate at the homepage the three buttons related to
personalization: MySFnight, Network and View List to E-mail.
We plan to address in a further development their needs of a
Month view in the calendar.
We improve the feedback after minimizing the calendar. Now user
name appear in user's picks: instead of My Picks, now is "Rosa's
Picks", for example.
View full report Usability
Testing, especially Results
and Discussion
sections
Spring 2001, 213 SFnight team
