Week 9: Traveline project – user testing, analysis and project progress

The past week has been a real learning experience for our Traveline group. The workload has been so high that it has been tough to stay on track. Despite complications, we have finished an impressive 24 user tests, with a perfect spread over our intended demographic, and are also well on our way to completing our data analysis. The experience has actually revealed how assistive technology such as Google Docs is almost essential to successful group work. We have getting close to a hundred documents now; spreadsheets, user test notes, minutes from meetings, templates, scripts, etc. It must have been so much harder to organize group projects before the internet and its multitude of useful tools. I do have one quibble with Google Docs. It could be better designed to organize folders between groups, rather than each individual contributor having to form their own folders. This is something that Dropbox, a shared online storage space, does successfully. Dropbox was used by our group to share screen captures and video data from our remote user tests.

Overall we are very pleased with the richness of the data we have gathered. It has led to some interesting findings, which I will leave to the report and presentation to demonstrate. We have begun looking at re-design ideas. The German website Bahn.de is an excellent example of the sort of functionality and layout we are hoping to suggest. We found that alot of people did not know how to make changes between stops confidently enough, and we are going to suggest that easily accessible tabbed maps would be a good idea. As well as working on suggestable implementations, we have produced a first draft of the report (for peer review), and begun looking at the structure of the presentation (to work out content and timings). With some hard work over the weekend, we should be set to pull everything together and finalise things next week.

On a less academic note, I’m going to finish by looking at a couple of new gadgets I came across the other day:

This keyboard; the uTron produced by Personal Media Japan, is an absolutely terrible design I think. Its ergonomics gone mad. As well as making some bizare split in the middle, some other pointless alterations have been made. The 'Z' key is twice the size (yer because like that gets used all the time), the space bar is tiny, and the 'alt' key is right next to the 'A' key. And wait for it... it actually cost £350! What a disaster.

I can't make my mind up about these coin USB sticks. On one hand it would fit nicely in your wallet, on the other hand you are pretty likely to lose it given enough time. It seems a bit of a gimic to be honest.

Finally the N97, which I won't say much about, other than it’s a very slick design (more so than the similar styled G1). However as I have learnt you need to live with a phone before judging its usability so will have to wait and see.