Blog Update #7
Blog Update #7a:
Conclusions:
Overall, despite the 2x2 ANOVA not being able to show any significance in regards to our interface’s speed up in efficiency, we did find significance in improving satisfaction of the lost and found process, especially for our added security measures.
This indicates that the prototype was not particularly effective in actually speeding up time spent on the lost and found process, but rather, just offered a more streamlined approach to all of this that students still preferred. Students could depend on the fact that if their items have been returned, it would be here and not anywhere else.
On the other hand, the prototype was effective in carrying out the design decisions we made to support the experimental goal of improving security with added measures like a UBC Campus Wide Login (CWL) login, and a “claimed items history log” to increase transparency and accountability of lost items.
Recommendations:
With the experiments conducted, we were able to validate that our prototype improved security measures for the existing lost and found process, with little uncertainty. However, before moving on to new design solutions, we are still curious about the efficiency of our proposed system as that was a major concern we discovered during our user studies. More specifically, we would be interested in seeing results from making some modifications to our prototype and experimental methods.
We speculate that prototype updates including adjusting the categorization of some of our newly added features, and improving discoverability of our “claimed items history log” would cause an uptick in users’ efficiency of completing tasks within the app.
In terms of methodology, it would also be valuable to revisit the idea of having 2 separate prototypes that optimized for efficiency and security separately, so that we could more easily correlate and attribute final results to users’ behaviours.
So there is still work that could be done for both the interface and the design approach we took, but the results we gathered do help us better understand what those adjustments need to be.
Blog Update #7b:
Doing various user studies helped our team to efficiently determine what the bottlenecks and challenges were in the current lost and found process at UBC. Learning from these users about their ideas and perceptions of how to go about returning or retrieving an item was valuable in order for us to make an initial prototype. One of the big surprises for us was that people’s approaches varied so significantly. For example, some strongly believed UBC should be in control of the majority of the process, whereas others believed it was up to individuals themselves to arrange and coordinate the return of items. Thus, our design needed to cater to both types of individuals; giving them the option to hold onto items themselves or return them to a UBC office.
One thing our team believes could have benefited our evaluation and prototyping is to create two separate prototypes. One prototype would focus on the security aspects, whereas the other would focus on speed. This would make differentiating the two aspects simpler.
Additionally, we would have been interested in looking at the finders workflow. Due to limited time, we were only able to prototype the workflow for someone that had lost an item. This limited our evaluation to only focusing on one of the two major parties involved in the process.
Finally, the social aspect of the process was one we were initially interested in exploring. From our user studies, we learned that users are interested in knowing whether their items were indeed returned at some point to their owner. This would have been interesting to look at both from a satisfaction and security perspective.
