Think-aloud evaluation

Think-aloud evaluation was done with letting a user test the prototype while talking, while taking notes.

What seemed to work well:

The design looked good, while there still being some quirks to sort out in for example the colour-palette.

Kind of easy to use

What seemed to work not as good:

The buttons are not self-explanatory enough to show what the user is doing.

The prototype doesn’t have all the buttons and links designed yet, so you can’t for example “login” with anything nor press a couple of buttons.

The target group is well-defined but yet very broad and thinking logically about who might use this service will give the conclusion that every commuter with a smartphone can benefit from having this application.

Since this course is focused on HCI and making platforms user friendly, it’s quite clear that the design matters just as much as the general idea. It’s very important to design a good user interface and make the whole application easy to use and understand without having redundant information or too much text. To make this process easier, you’d need to do several more think-aloud evaluations.

First one on the first prototype will reveal big flaws. When you later on have everythin sorted out and feel pleased with the design, you’d need to do a new evaluation to let someone “outside” the project see things that you might’ve not seen. Testing over and over will in the end give the best result for this specific project.

The weak points will from this iterative testing be revealed over and over until we have a very solid foundation to start making adjustments to the design for other "hooks" in the application. If you'd for instance want to add a map, you'd need to redesign alot of the application to make it seamless and therefore do even more testing. Therefore, a good solution to this is to have wiggle room in your project to avoid "dead ends".