Below is the feedback received in our Heuristic Evaluations and how we tackled these issues.
The first evaluation was facilitated by Noah in cooperation with Kelvin and Geoffrey of Personal Curatour.
The second evaluation was facilitated by Anjali and Will in cooperation with Julia of Personal Curatour.
Here is an overview image of our revised design:
Below is a list of the issues identified and how we responded to them.
- The emotion icons are ambiguous, violating heuristic 2: matching between the system and the real world with a severity of 1.
We believe that the lack of the color in the smartboard paper prototype makes those emotions more ambiguous than they would be in the real design (where they would match commonly known emojis), but we agree that the "confusion" face is particularly ambiguous and have adjusted it accordingly.
- The comment-viewing screens on the app and smartboard have inconsistent interfaces, violating heuristic 4: consistency and standards with a severity of 2.
We have adjusted the smartboard interface to more closely match the phone interface.
- Emotions are seemingly randomly arranged in a line rather than as a spectrum, violating heuristic 2: matching between the system and the real world with a severity of 2.
We rearranged the line of emojis on the smartboard to be on a spectrum from angry to excited.
- Comments on the smartboard look like a conversation rather than discrete threads, violating heuristic 4: consistency and standards with a severity of 2.
The comments should not look like a conversation; we have adjusted the board's view of other users' comments to more closely match the phone's interface, which does not give the illusion of a conversation.
- The screen on the phone that shows similar comments to the user's comment does not inform the user that these comments are supposed to be similar, violating heuristic 6: recognition rather than recall with a severity of 2.
We added a bit of text at the top of the page to indicate that these comments are similar to the user's.
- The back buttons on the phone leave a comment screen and similar comments screen have unclear destinations, violating heuristic 3: user control and freedom with a severity of 2.
We changed the leaving a comment screen slightly to make it more of an overlay of the "Thanks for sharing! This many people felt the way you do" screen rather than its own page, hopefully making it clear that the back button on the seeing other comments screen should go to the "Thanks for sharing! This many people felt the way you do" screen (we had not previously considered the functions of the back buttons on these screens, but this seems like a logical solution).
- The "Thanks for Sharing" page has a lot of text, violating heuristic 8: aesthetic and minimalist design with a severity of 2.
We slightly decreased the amount of text and believe that on a true phone the text will appear smaller. We believe the remaining text serves an important explanatory function in the interface.
- The option to have both keyboard and writing functionality on the smartboard seems unnecessary, violating heuristic 8: aesthetic and minimalist design with a severity of 1.
From our findings with the grafitti wall, we believe that some people enjoy drawing / writing their responses as opposed to typing them. Therefore we have opted to still include the writing option.
- There are no back buttons on the comment thread and emotion filter screens on the smartboard, violating heuristic 3: user control and freedom with a severity of 3.
We added these buttons immediately upon receiving this feedback during the evaluation, as shown in the images below.
- The hues surrounding the paintings on the smartboard may be too much info for the home screen of the smartboard, violating heuristic 8: aesthetic and minimalist design with a severity of 1.
We limit these colors to the most common 3 emotional responses, which will hopefully eliminate overwhelming rainbows of color. However, we have added a small tooltip to indicate the purpose of these hues, as we realize this was not clear orginally.
