User Testing and Iterating

Hydra Dynamic
Sep 4, 2018 · 2 min read

-Jiarong Liu

This week the class conducted user testing with our Lo-fi prototypes. Our group divided itself into two parts, one group stayed as proctors for testing our prototype, and the other half went on to test and give feedback on the other groups.

In creating our testing protocol we wanted to test how simple it was for a user to get from our landing screen/home screen to the ending screen, which would be a page for a restaurant or other business that our user was interesting in going to.

We gave a brief introduction to the user giving a general description of the purpose of our application and we gave them a persona to play while they tested our application. The persona was a 67 year old person looking for a place to eat. We outlined the user task to be to find a place to eat that offers a discount for their age group.

Our prototype was a paper prototype showing mock-ups of our various application screens. Testing was done Wizard of Oz style in which one of our members overlaid the relevant screens when the user performed an action on the screen. The other group members acted as observers and took notes while the users were testing our prototype.

One group of users testing our application

While users were testing our application our group members were paying attention to any pauses or confusions the users may have had and took notes accordingly. After the users completed the task, we laid out all the screens and asked for their feedback.

Much of the feedback we received was similar between the different user testers. Two of the major items included putting a link to the home screen on every page and to change the layout of the search screen to be more intuitive and to decrease the amount of information overload. Other notes were about various design considerations, possible features we may add, and technical methods we may research for future implementation.

We received feedback from 8 different user groups and compiled the main points of feedback for discussion in our group and for implementation in our beta prototype.

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