Before we created the ‘real thing’ we made a paper prototype version of the application, in order to help guide our product development according to users responses.
Our test ‘scenario’ was of a Latin American who has moved to the area arriving at Elephant & Castle for the 1st time. They use EnviroNet to find out about their community. Therefore all our testers were all from the Latin American community in London, but not local to the area.
The test was designed to take place ‘on the move’. We walked around the area and users input a search, from a range of options generated from the real content from our ‘tagging’ exercise at Carnival del Pueblo. As we were operating the prototype ourselves, the exercise was not primarily for testing the interface usability, but to test the concept of the product - to see how they would use it, how they feel about using it and what ideas they may generate to develop it’s use.
Findings
Users stated they would mainly use EnviroNet during weekends, holidays, and ‘free time’. They also really liked the idea of this product- General Quotes: ‘I’m impressed, I don’t normally like this stuff’ (user 1) ‘Really useful’ (user 3) ‘The idea is wonderful, the whole thing is very nice’ (user 4)
However, they did also come up with some interesting and unexpected suggestions, for example:
Communities: extending this category to include more personal interests, such as music genres, sports or gay community, rather than just ethnic communities. Although EnviroNet allows users to add their own communities, this feedback prompted us to include a wider range of examples for future tests to see how users would respond.
Self-Regulation: we intended for the system to be self-regulating, users asked whether the messages they saw were from ‘real people’, and asked what would happen if anyone tried to exploit the system for commercial purposes. So we decided to add a visible ‘rate inappropriate’ button, which if selected 3 times by different users, would result in the removal of an inappropriate message.
Keywords: they could only use a limited number of keywords for this test, as it’s a system that builds up the more people use it, in fact user 4 stated ‘The more people use it, to add more varied information, the better it will get’. So we decided to add a ‘popular keywords’ feature, so that users had a list of keywords to choose, as during the early stages of the products use there would be fewer keyword in the system, so they need to have an indication of what’s available.