To gain more insight on how well our product works in front of actual users, we have developed wireframes in order to give a basic framework of the project’s layout. Moving forward with our research, we conducted a mini demo of our product to gain some informal feedback from a group of software engineers. We have also conducted a cognitive walkthrough of our wireframes to gain a better understanding of what areas users may not be so clear on and what we need to focus on going forward to Phase III.
Wireframes helped us to visualize the concepts that we have gathered and put into a model. They are the basic framework of the project’s layout, helping us to put our ideas together. This allows us to gain insight as to what direction we want to steer ourselves towards.
Link to Wireframes: Wireframes
Cognitive Walkthroughs allowed us to gain insight from outside users on what areas that we need to improve upon and what areas are not clear. These users put themselves into personas that we created and conducted a step-by-step interactive test of our application to see if it was functional.
From what we have gathered, the ability to create wireframes have drastically improved our ability to develop our product. Being able to let users navigate a wide variety of songs and the ability to like and dislike them, while sounding simple is actually a more complicated process than one may think. Our findings have lead us to learn more about how users may interact with Song Snippet and what we have found:
Within the results of our cognitive walkthrough, we have found some mixed results. While some users were able to achieve their goal, it was not without some issues. The main problem is that the menus were not clear enough for users to be able to navigate through seamlessly. There was a lot of assumption that users were able to do certain actions because of how we based it off of our findings from similar apps. The main assumption was users already knowing that they are able to intuitively swipe left and right to dislike and like songs.
From those findings, we have learned that we should make the interface more clear for first-time users. Even though users were able to achieve their goal to some degree, we want to make a friendlier experience for users so that they are more encouraged to keep using our product. Our findings have lead us to conclude that we should focus more on:
Upon further development of Song Snippet, we were able to implement the methods that we have learned from Phase I and have adapted those findings into our own wireframes. We strive to make our design simple and efficient, so that it is easier for users to learn and use. Upon the results from our Phase II testing from our cognitive walkthroughs, we have discovered some mixed results that users were getting lost at some points, but were still able to achieve their goal in the end. Our informal feedback did not provide as fruitful feedback, so we have decided to focus more on the feedback from our cognitive walkthroughs.
From what we have learned throughout Phase II, we have decided that we do not need to incorporate that much design toward our user testing in Phase III. Rather we plan to focus more on our interaction with users and make it easier for them to interact with. We will plan to implement design along the way, however it will not be our main focus moving forward.
One caveat is the limited amount of data that we are able to collect when conducting our cognitive walkthrough and informal feedback from a group of software engineers. When gathering data, we were not able to gather a wide variety of data so the results of our data is not as comprehensive as we would have liked it to be. Being able to gather a wider range of data from a variety of users would be optimal to discover any glaring issues that we may have and will benefit us greatly.