User Test #1 – Mall Manager

Test subject demographics:

• Number of test subjects: 4 students
• Gender: 3 females, 1 male
• Class: 4 Seniors
• Majors: Electrical Engineering, Biochemistry/Managerial Studies, CS/Asian Studies, Biochemistry

Computer usage:

• All four users reported average to frequent usage of the computer.
• All four were most familiar with the Windows operating system.
• Three users had an average familiarity with wizard-driven interfaces. One user was not familiar with that type of interface.

Interface-specific questions:

After the users had a chance to interact with the interface in the user test, they responded to several questions about their experience.

• All users said the interface was very self-explanatory.
• In general, all users seemed to like the layout of the interface.
• When asked what they really liked about the interface, two users mentioned that they liked the ability to evict tenants. I think this points at the reward system (rewards/consequences) of the game. One person mentioned that the layout was “very intuitive and easy to understand”.
• One user reported that nothing was particularly difficult. However, another user mentioned that she was confused about the two tabbed panes (for “Mall” and “Stores” details) and where she should go to look for information about stores (stores in general as opposed to specific stores).

Additional Suggestions:

Most of the suggestions, if not explicit, dealt with the problem of distinguishing the areas of the interface that had the general mall and specific store information. One user suggested that some kind of color difference could be used to distinguish general mall information from the specific store information.

Notes:

Overall, the user test allowed us to see that perhaps not everything was as intuitive as we thought. We had to give explanations at certain points because there was no obvious functionality or response (due to the nature of the test). At other times, we had to give hints to steer the users down the path that we wanted to observe. However, it was good to see the user’s thinking processes and note how they would go about certain tasks. We also gave hints when it became obvious that the user was stuck.

From the tests, we noticed the following things that could be improved in the next version:

• In the wizard, give visible descriptions of the demographic headings (on the “Enter Demographics” page).
• Make the demographic headings’ “edit” functionality more obvious. Some users immediately “clicked” on the expansion boxes and discovered the editable fields. However, some were at a loss at where the editing should actually take place.
• The actual application will allow the user to edit the mall layout and demographics after he has entered it into the wizard.
• The main problem with the main manager interface was the distinction between and clarity of the two sets of tabbed panes on the right side of the application window. Prior to testing, it seemed obvious that users would go to the “Mall” section for general mall information and to “Store” for specific information about stores. As we observed the subjects, though, we realized that it wasn’t intuitive to everyone and the location of certain information was very confusing. We need to either rename the tabs and section headings and/or find another way to offset the information.
• The customer (DXN) had a slight problem with knowing whom he was going to chat with. None of the users had difficulty with this and, once they were familiar with the pull-down selection menu of stores, knew whom they would be chatting with when they hit “Chat With Store”. Previously, we thought we’d have to do something to make this more obvious but change doesn’t seem necessary.