Hi, we’re designing an app for Northeastern students to find events around campus. Connecting to your Facebook account, this app makes it easy for you to find events you can attend.
Informed consent: We are conducting a study to find out what people think about this. We will not record or publish any information with your name. This is for a course we’re taking in Human-Computer Interaction from Prof. Bickmore in the College of Computer and Information Science. Your participation is voluntary and you can stop anytime and ask that your data not be used in our study. Would you help us with this, it should take about 5 minutes?
Great. We really appreciate your help with this. As I mentioned before, we are working on an app for Northeastern students to easily find events around campus. Our product involves a mobile application as the interface. The purpose of our study today is for you to help us discover any errors or difficulties with our interface. We want to make it user-friendly before we develop it, which is why we are not going to use a computer, but paper versions of the screens.
We’ll give you three different tasks that we feel represent different interactions with our application such as finding a specific event or finding an event through a club. Your job today is to tell us what is easy to understand, what’s confusing, and whether something was unexpected.
The other members of the team, Bahar and Noah, will just be watching and taking notes.
We’re not testing you, we’re testing the interface, so if you run into any problems, it’s not your fault and it means there is something we need to change in our interface.
The prototype is in its early stages, so we’re still thinking through how it should work, and we really appreciate any feedback.
Melina will be playing the role of the computer and will be updating the paper pages as you interact with them. She may seem like a smart computer, but she has no speech recognition or artificial intelligence. She is not allowed to explain anything to you, so interact with the prototype the same way you would with a smart phone. Use your finger to click on buttons, or write on the post-it.
Again, please tell us what makes sense to you or ask us any questions you have. We may not answer them right away, but we will note them to change our interface.
Remember that we’re testing the interface—we’re not testing you. Do you have any questions before we begin? Are you ready to start?
Okay, here’s the first thing we’d like you to do. Take a minute to read this and let me know if it makes sense. If so, then whenever you’re ready please show us what you would do first.