Further testing

For the next evaluation of our application, we will use the paper prototype for the last time. We will now describe how this testing will happen.


What will we test?
We have 3 core functionalities in our application: mining and rating articles, adding friends and getting statistics of a user compared to his friends. This is why we made 3 special tasks to test the usability of these features.
We also wonder if the detailed statistics can be found by the users. The screen is not accessible in a single click, so we added a fourth task to test if our users can find it.
In addition to these detailed information, we also want to know the overall feeling our users have of the application.

How will we test it?
The users will perform these tasks in the order below. They get the next task as soon as the previous one is finished.
We will measure both the time it takes to perform a task, as the amount of clicks needed to perform it.

1. add a friend
2. compare your statistics to those of your friend "Drill Bill"
3. mine and rate an article
4. find the detailed statistics of the category "sport".

Once the users are finished with the prototype, we will ask them to fill in an additional questionnaire. This should help us measuring the overall usability of the application and the feeling users have of the application. We want to keep the amount of questions lower than 20. Otherwise our users would get bored with the questions and might give the application a worse rating, just because they are getting bored.
We have chosen to use the CSUQ test. This seems the best one to represent what we want to know. Other tests are more focussed on the job of a person or the errors the application gives. We also don't want a too short question list, as that doesn't provide enough information. The 19 questions of CSUQ seemed like the best way to go.

Who will we test on?
As our application is designed for adolescents, we will try to test this on adolescents. This means people between 14 and 22 years old, both boys and girls. It is best if these people don't know too much of informatics. Everyone in our group will test 2 people, so we have 8 testpersons in total. For the ease of finding people, we will ask people in our direct surroudings during the weekend. In Leuven we don't have access to many people in our testing range.

Report 1

The following link contains our first report for the course of human-computer interaction. In this report we explain what we did during the first step of our project. We go into detail about our concept with the aid of a storyboard and a screen-transition diagram. Then we continue with explaining our paper prototype and what conclusions we took from these first tests of our application. Finally we also make some conclusions about this iteration and plan on what we will do in the next iteration.

We wrote the report in English, so our non-dutch-speaking readers can also read the report.

http://www.mediafire.com/?cb3824a2ffh1bww/

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.