1. CS 615 – Final Presentation The Personal Advisor Team
By:
Omar Bukhari
Anastasiya Smirnova
Vadim Platonov
Daniel Koulomzin
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2. The Personal Advisor
The interface is designed to make the process of registration faster and more convenient.
Simple and designed to cater the user needs i.e. students.
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3. After the first presentation ..
The first presentation displayed how we started, what decisions we made, how we carried out tests.
It also highlighted our first interactive prototype.
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4. Looking back at our first design
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5. Looking back ……
Even though we spent a lot of time thinking and then designing our first prototype there was room for a lot of improvement. Here is one screen which we thought would need improvement for our second interactive prototype.
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7. Getting ready for the final thing..
Once we were done with the first prototype and then the presentation we were left with improving what we had already done. Three major things needed to be done:
The Heuristic evaluation
The usability study
Integrating everything to come up with the final prototype.
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8. The Heuristic Evaluation
Before our interface was evaluated by the Sathish’s group (the online book store) we were quite happy with what we had!
But when we saw the evaluation and what had to be improved it did annoy us a little( sure!) but at the same time helped us pinpoint any short comings.
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9. The Heuristic Evaluation
In fact the fixes that we made really improved the interface. Here we go…
1. Problem #1: [H1-2 Match between System and Real World] (Severity Rating 3)
No login page is provided. Slides provided by the group indicate that login is one of the tasks that the users will perform. Design of the website does not indicate that such facility will be provided once the user selects to register into certain classes. There is a conspicuous absence of the registration page.
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10. This is what the old login page looked like…
Even though we had the login page we forgot to link it. Here is what it looked like:
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13. Problem #2: [H1-2 Match between System and Real World] [Severity 3] On the course description page, the “Type Class” text field is ambiguous and confusing. Does type mean class name, class number or a combination of both?
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14. Heuristic Evaluation contd…
3. Problem #3: [H1-2 Match between System and Real World] [Severity 2]
The combination of “Number of Classes” and “Days” on the class registration page is confusing. Are we talking about the maximum number of classes a day here, or minimum? Are classes that have sections that fall on selected and non selected days filtered out?
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17. Adding a rating
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20. The Usability Test
In order to carry out the usability tests we needed to find people who would be willing to put in time and honestly go over the interface.
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21. Usability Testing The testers were:
Iti Behari – a Umass Boston Computer Science freshman.
Tuan Pham – A high-level computer user. He is a transfer student from the University of California, Berkley.
Neha Garg – A senior Computer Science student with good computer skills.
Boris – a sophomore
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22. Task Analysis Login Creating a schedule
 Registration: known selection
 Registration: clueless
 Drop classes
See course descriptions
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23. Task Analysis, contd Rating  View rating for Professors and Classes
 Share your experience with other students anonymously (We know that Professors will hate us for this but remember that the system is to benefit students).
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24. Design Decisions
Used our highly artistic abilities create numerous paper based prototypes.
Set up scenarios for users to go through.
Iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate …….
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25. Problems the users encountered
There were not a lot of problems the users encountered:
One concern users had was that we did not not any help documentation.
Pages should describe what they are for.
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26. User Timing
Since we did not link our interface we were not able to carry out time analysis:
Login: 0.45 s
Creating a schedule: 3 mins
Dropping classes: 1 min
Add rating: 2 mins
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27. What we learned?
We learned that users may not always be right, and they can be bad critics since they always want things catered.
Users never read instructions carefully.
We should spend a lot of time testing with potential users.
Users tend to assume how features work.
Never ask your family or friends to help out. They only complicate the situation and never tell you any of the problems.
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28. To view our interface
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