User Testing Summary of Think Alouds

We learned early in the semester that usability testing and user testing in general are extremely important and beneficial to the design process. Especially as engineers, it is crucial that we test our designs and our products with users unlike ourselves. For our group, children were the target group, so children are who we tested our product with.

Something we kept in mind while testing was the definition of usability from Jan Gulliksen's lecture:

"the extent to which a product can be used, by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use."

Also, from James McConnell's guest lecture, we liked a few of the canvases he presented for personas and user testing. We decided to use the user testing plan canvas. 

Detailed Summary of User Testing/Think Alouds:

Our users ranged from the age of 7-10. Each of the children were accompanied by their parents. We did our user tests on Sunday, November 2, 2014 right outside the entry to the Natural History Museum between the hours of 15:30 and 17:00. It was about 5 degrees celsius outside. The sun set at 15:50, so it was beginning to get dark.

Observations of User Tests broken down by aspects of Usability:
Effectiveness:
- The users did not realize there was a start button. If they did, they did not press it with their foot.
- The users did not realize that the monkey (aka Drakis the stuffed dragon) was climbing the tree and gaining one point for each correct answer.
- None of the users read the descriptive text about the animal on the panel.
- The children's parents encouraged them when they were correct, incorrect, or unsure.

Efficiency:
- The users responded well to instant feedback which in our case was "ding" for correct and "buzzz/urghh" for incorrect.
- The users seemed to follow the guided instructions quite well.
- The children were mostly logical with process of elimination, however we did note that it would make things better if the screens could be greyed out. This would prevent user error.

Satisfaction:
- When a user did not know the answer, they often seemed uncomfortable. We hypothesize that the reason for this was because 5 people were staring at them.
- The difficulty level seemed just about right, although one child did say, "Va svårt det var!" when he walked away with his father. We definitely don't want the game to be easy, and the difficulty did keep him engaged!

The reason we noted all of those details above about the environment of our user testing is because it was not a typical environment where the game would be placed. Inside the museum it was quite noisy, and we did not want to disturb anyone, so we did our tests outside. Because of this uncomfortable environment, many users did not explore as much as we had hoped. Our theory is that given a typical museum setting where a user is more comfortable, the user will most likely spend a little more time in the game an around the exhibit.

Based on our user testing, we did change some aspects of our game for our final product. Those can be noted here.