Exercise 5 - Summary Think-aloud - All members

Six think aloud studies has been conducted to find out if our prototype fulfilled its intended purpose or not, as well as for finding out flaws in the design from a usability perspective. We used the prototyping tool Marvelapp which enabled us to connect slides together to make an interactive application. Our focus this time was on the use of technology and thus removing the core focus from the earlier stages, namely how to evaluate the data or the design related issues.

We'd like to start the summary by informing that every member was concerned with the familiarity bias, which obviously is a type of familiarity heuristics, when presenting our prototype to the think-aloud participants. We were afraid that the usage of similar softwares for the purposes not very different from ours would interfere with the participant's mindset, and therefore we tried different approaches to tackle this issue. Every member did this intuitively in his/her own way independently of anyone else. The most common method was to ask the participant if his/her usage of a function or a button was intuitive or by association with another software in order to gain an insight whether our application would be easy to use for as many people as possible. Here, we'd like to remind the reader that although we were tasked with improving the system that were used today, we had no intention of doing something crazy and "outside-the-box" such that no familiarity of the earlier system's could be traced. Therefore, this insight was important for us because we were concerned about if our improvements would on one hand do its job, but on the other hand cancel out all intuition from similar interfaces. We knew a lot of tourists own smartphones and browse the Internet, so many functions, such as the size and icons of the buttons and the instruction-flow timeline, were designed to minimize confusion.

The participants were told to use the application and follow certain steps in order to buy a ticket. They were told to comment everything that comes to mind out loud, for instance, difficulties in navigating between frames or the positioning of certain elements. These comments might also include what they were looking at, feeling, or thinking, in accordance to the well established techniques of protocol analysis. Since the mission was very task-specific and a brief task analysis had to be done before starting, we consider our inspection method to follow a cognitive walkthrough model. Except from these questions, no further instructions were given. The data were gathered both concurrently, that is, while performing the study, and retrospectively. We believe we got valuable feedback from our participants. To summarize, the following improvements would be needed for our final version:

The text saying "Or" should be placed in the middle to enhance the options, on frame 2. The cancel button should give the ability to abort the cancellation if pressed by accident. Also pressing back should not reset the amount of tickets to zero. The timeline should be all green after the transaction, and the total price should be separated from the ticket prices.