4. MS Teams — Prototype Evaluation
“To eliminate the risk of investing a lot of time and effort in work that’s based on bad assumptions, we begin by validating our assumptions.” (Gothelf & Seiden, 2016, p. 12)
The interviews and usability tests were completely remote, and we used the Moderated Research method. We used paper prototype and Invision (to make it interactive). We asked the user to execute simple tasks to enable us to learn the impact of our decisions.
The tasks:
- Create a Poll
- Ask a yes or no question
- Use the application to ask a student for feedback
Testing Script:
You can check here other questions that we considered here.
A summary of my finding in the testing phase:
Camila is a Brazilian primary teacher, and she is 35 years old. She gives art classes in the USA as a result of a project that she had started in Brazil. In general, all the expected actions were accomplished. First, it was asked to her to find the poll icon, followed by the step of effectively create it. It was not fully understood the action of asking feedback to a student, after completing the question. It was interpreted as if the student could change the previous answer, not to explain it further. It was interesting to note that the pie chart seems to help the poll to be more useful to the teacher. Probably because of the number of the students and how it would summarise it. Despite the misinterpretation about the possibility of asking a student to explain an answer further, on the last page, it became clear. Camila has explained by herself what that page meant to be.
The overall experience was considered positive. It is needed more feedback about the prototype.
At this point, the changes that might be considered are about the presentation of page 5, to make it clearer to the teacher what is the target of that action.
To access the consent form to this interview, click here (it is required a password).
Improvements
As a result of 3 and 4 rounds of testing with users, we made the adjustments below:
Final Prototype
The final prototype that we came up with, showed several changes from the initial concept that can be seen here. About language, number of screens, adjustment of the call to actions.
Considerations
“Much has been made about the importance of design iteration. However, this is not just fine-tuning late in the development cycle. Rather, true iterative design allows for the complete overhaul and rethinking of a design, through early testing of conceptual models and design ideas. If designers are not prepared for such a major step, then the influence of iterative design becomes minimal and cosmetic.” (Rubin & Chisnell, 2008)
One of the most exciting parts of this approach was to find out a way to make a paper prototype works digitally. Besides that, when we work remotely to create something in a group, it is important to realise ways of helping your colleagues in a way that everybody feel that they are listened and supported. I felt that working in a team, made my experience with prototyping broader, and not because I did it more. It happened because I had to think more carefully about some aspects and consider things such as other’s background and time available. Our meeting and conversations had to be very structured and objective to achieve a goal.
The major downside I had was that I was not prepared for interviewing, as I assumed that I was. It is a challenging task since you can easily influence the participant without intention. I rushed my participant and had not asked her to think aloud. It is a learning that I will bring with me for future researches.
Bibliography
Cooper, A., Reimann, R., Cronin, D. & Noessel, C. (2014). About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design (4th ed.). Indianapolis, Indiana, USA: Wiley.
Gothelf, J., & Seiden, J. (2016). Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams (2nd ed.). Sebastopol, CA, USA: O’Reilly Media.
Levy, J. (2015). UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want. Sebastopol, CA, USA: O’Reilly Media.
Moran, K. (2019, December 1). Usability Testing 101. Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved November, 2020, from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-testing-101/
Moran, K., Pernice, K. (2020, April 26). Remote Moderated Usability Tests: How to Do Them. Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved November, 2020, from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/moderated-remote-usability-test/
Preece, J., Sharp, H. and Rogers, Y. (2019). Interaction Design: Beyond Human- Computer Interaction (5th ed.). John Wiley & Sons.
Rubin, J., & Chisnell, D. (2008). Handbook of usability testing: how to plan, design and conduct effective tests (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons.
