Paper prototype

Since we had to re-do a lot of the work of the previous sessions, we are running a little behind on schedule. We started with paper-prototype tests of our application on Wednesday. We started with a prototype to test on our own. Not all popups and mouse-over effects were there, as it was just to see if we didn't forget some major functions. In the picture below, you can see how the prototype looked like. We already kept in mind some of the things we learned from the paper prototype tests of our previous concept. Users want a close-button for the menu items, and don't want to click the menu on the left. They are lost if we just give them a menu, they want close buttons. We decided having both the menus and close buttons available would be best.

Once we had a good feeling about it, we made a second prototype. This time we tested it on people sitting in the hall of the computer-science department. We noticed people didn't know where the mining button was for. They kept clicking on it, while they were already on that screen. This button remained there from the time we didn't have the close buttons. In the next prototype we will remove this button.

The users also wanted to be able to select which friends are being used to determine what articles they are mining. To achieve this, we will add an extra button in the friends list. By clicking this, a friend can be enabled or disabled.

We are now testing our new version of the paper prototype with new users and hope the interface will be better with our new improvements.