Last week we had a couple different iterations of our four year planner that each of us brought to class. This week we decided to take those multiple designs iterations out in to the real world for testing in parallel. The reason why we chose to test a couple different versions at the same time was that we could get feedback about a lot of different design aspects at the same time. That way we could learn from what worked and what didn’t in each version and capitalize on the strengths of each.
We went about testing our iterations in a very geurilla fashion and presented users with paper prototypes of different screens they would walk through. We decided to stay low-fidelity during this process in order to test our mock-ups quickly and fail fast. This way our efforts would focus more on implementation and meaningful feedback.
When presenting the paper prototypes to our friends we first told them to imagine that they were first year cognitive science students trying to figure out what classes they should take up to their senior year. The first screen was a login landing page meant to collect basic information about the student. We asked our friends while presenting this to them: What would you do if you saw this? and watched them explain how they would reaction to each prompt. The second page took them to the actual four-year planner where we continued to ask them open-ended questions like: How would you make sense of these requirements? How would you try and add a class? How would you tell if you already took a class? Their answers and reactions were extremely valuable and we learned quickly what people were confused about and what they understood. In this next coming week we will continue to test and refine our designs using the feedback from users.
