Our original testing strategies for user testing were not fulfilled, for various reasons, including issues of time and lab space. After several attempts, we were finally able to schedule time for our fellow cs092 classmates to look at our project Thursday, April 30th, directly after class. However, the VA10 course ended much sooner than expected and we were not able to have them test the project during their class time. We choose to hand out the User Questionnaires on the next possible day that they were meeting, consequently their last day of the course, and ask that they return the completed survey within the week to Professor Mayer. This option seemed better than nothing, however, we did not recieve responses from the class as hoped.
The results from the cs092 user-testing were very helpful, although we would have liked to have had more people come. Although a lot of the comments were about things that we were already aware of, it was good to hear peoples opinions voiced about issues that we had been grappling with ourselves.
The biggest things that resulted from the comments and feed-back we recieved had to do with the applets. After viewing the applets' size on the browsers in the PC lab, and the general unmanageability caused by this, we have scaled all the applets down considerably. After discussion with Roger Blumberg, we also decided to scrap the pop-up windows for the color chooser and instead include the chooser and exercise on panels within the same applet. The pop-up windows were becoming too complicated, and people were accumulating them as they went through the program because they were created for each exercise.
Another change that has been made since the user-testing is in the user interaction with the color chooser. At the time of testing, in the HSL chooser the selection circle had to be clicked and dragged directly to be moved, and now the user can click anywhere within the HSL 'slice' to relocate the circle, as well as, click and drag it to a different location. The same is true of the double-cone shape, the slice on the HSL shape can be relocated by clicking on a different location, instead of having to drag it there as before.
So, much of the time remaining time is being spent implementing these changes and also getting all the applets to work correctly in browsers on both PCs and Macs. Also, improvements on the speed and memory are being made.
Several of the responses to our questions regarding the contents bar and the navigation arrows suggested that we include all the contents on the side. However, because of the small number of people that were able to look at the site and also the fact that most were rushing to get to their next class, etc.. we choose not to change this. We believe our reasons for limiting the contents still hold. Since the site is primarily designed for Professor Mayer's VA10 class as a homework assignment, that hopefully will not be rushed through, we believe the students will read the introduction and understand how the site is organized. We believe that perhaps the confusion of some of the respondants was due to the fact that they didn't read the introduction and text, as some readily confessed.
There were several suggestions that were particularly interesting, and we might try to implement them for the final presentation day on the 14th. These include possibly re-doing the contents bar on the left and making it into an image where the text highlights during mouse-over. We also hope to put the questionnaire online in hopes that we might get some responses.
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