Exercise 5 - Think aloud-evaluation - Edwin Li

I have interviewed an American tourist who was allowed to utilize the prototype for its intended use. His name is Philip Morrison and he is 22 years old. No instructions except for the most basic ones were given to Mr Morrison, who consequently was instructed to use the prototype intuitively. The focus point for this event was on the use of technology, as was requested according to the peer assessment on the project work. I was concerned that heuristic bias, more specifically familiarity heuristics, that is, the familiarity with similar software and interfaces, would interfere negatively. Therefore the participant was asked to tell whether his remarks were by pure intuition, or by association with a similar functionality in another program.

The web-prototyping software Marvelapp (https://marvelapp.com/) was used to build the prototype, and the prototype was exported in tablet format for easier usage. The only hints were on how to click on certain buttons during use while preserving the functionality. The participant was also reminded of the fact that some functions hadn't yet been implemented. Before the start, the participant was instructed to speak out about everything that comes to mind when he was performing the tasks, and in specific, comment about the visibility, usability and functionality on every page, a technique called Think aloud evaluation. This might include what they were looking at, feeling, thinking or doing, in accordance to the common techniques of protocol analysis. I gathered notes on the evaluator's thoughts, both concurrently, while using the prototype, and in retrospect, that is after using the prototype. More data was collected in retrospect rather than in concurrent use.

Frame 1: Simple and intuitive home page. The buttons were large enough to click and small enough to not obstruct any views. 

Frame 2: Nice timeline, good idea. The list of options is segmented into gray and white areas which is good. The text saying "Or" should be placed in the middle to enhance the options.

Frame 3: Nice use of universal colors (green is completed, yellow is waiting). Simple and intuitive to use. The box that states which zones you're travelling within is helpful. The button "Next" should be grayed out if no amount of tickets are chosen. 

Frame 4: The summary of the cost is highlighted which is good since it's my main focus. The cancel button does its expected thing, but it should really give the me the ability to abort my cancellation, if I pressed it by accident. Also pressing back should not reset my amount of tickets to 0.

Frame 5: The timeline should be all green after the transaction.

Who uses the service? I'd say the intended target, a tourist, uses the service. This means that the participant is expected to have limited knowledge about the Swedish metro transit system and also limited language skills. Since the mission is very task-specific and a light task analysis had to be done before starting, I consider my inspection method to be a cognitive walkthrough. This is more obvious since I asked the participant questions about each frame (step) retrospectively. The problems has been compiled and our software will be redesigned accordingly.