At the moment we are writing this blog post, we still working on our prototype which will be completed by the end of the week. As we said before, we have chosen the Marvelapp website as a platform to build our prototype.
Meanwhile, we sent invitations to two of our stakeholders, Heather and Mark, to do the prototype demonstrations with them. We’ve agreed that these testings will take place on two different days, one day with Mark and another day with Heather, as our availabilities are not always compatible, and also that our group will be split for each interview as we don’t need to be all there, too many people can also make it difficult to conduct user interviews as the end user may feel uncomfortable if there are too many of us there. We think that the user will feel much more confident in this way, and it’s important to build a relationship of trust between us and the stakeholder.
So on Monday 4th December, Jordy and Isaac will have a meeting with Mark, and on Tuesday 5th December, Ellen and Aymeric will do the same with Heather. We still need to fix the time for each interview, knowing that we only can after 5 p.m on monday and after 3 p.m on tuesday.
Mark’s interview will surely be held in his office, just as we did when we first spoke to him, but the location of Heather’s prototype demonstration is still unknown. We don’t want to do the same mistake as go into a coffee shop to ask her some questions, as we did the first time we met her, because there were too much people and to much noise. So we are thinking on asking her to go at the university instead.
The user interviews should help us to understand how well our designs perform in practice, the accessibility to the end user, and to get some fresh point of view about our project. This is very important for the end goal of our project as it needs to be easily useable. We also hope to answer the question of how effective our prototype is at displaying the accountability of the council when working on cycling projects. We will ask at the end of the interviews if the interviewee has any overall issues with the design and how we could correct them.
At the end of this process the two separate groups will come back together and discuss the feedback from the meetings. Using this information we would then address the major issues, which would most likely be the issues raised by both of the interviewees and add or remove these features to the design and correct them.
Hello team, many thanks for the outline of your prototype demonstration sessions. The post communicates a good overall idea of a usability testing plan that considers participant needs (timing, location, etc) whilst also your team’s resources. It’s good to see you made have drawn some conclusions with regard to the settings for your usability test to avoid (i.e. a coffee shop). I am not sure if that was mentioned or discussed in the earlier blog entries; so it is good to find this mentioned here.
You have a good idea for some general goals for your usability test. The specific outcome (whether participants feel this kind of tool may help in raising the accountability of the forum) could have perhaps been discussed a bit more. For your final reflective log it would be good to discuss the concept of ‘accountability’ early and what this means.
While you spit the team, it is not clear what kinds of documentation you have prepared to assure consistency in the conduct of the usability test (e.g. script, how is the session going to be managed). Also, what were your thoughts on documenting the outcomes of the usability tests. Are there any specific actions, comment you planned to document? Also would those be related to parts of the prototype? What have you planned to give participants freedom to explore your prototype and voice their views?
I’d also be very interested to see you think about the concept of the five-act-interview in the design sprint and have that referenced and related to your project in your final design log.
Looking forward to hearing about your findings. Onwards.