Summary of our Think Aloud Evaluations and future improvements

We used the Think Aloud Evaluation assignment as an opportunity to thoroughly evaluate our current prototype, and for further improvement. The evaluations we did focused on testing both the design and implementation of the current features in the app. The goals with our evaluations was to assess the extent of our prototypes functionality, and level of customization. Another important goal of these evaluations was to identify specific problems in our app.

The Think Aloud Evaluations were carried out through making people click around in our app while speaking out aloud about their thoughts as they navigated. At the same time, we observed the users and noted their reactions and actions while we judged how well our design supported the intended task, Audio Guide. We also took careful notice of the problems that occurred. In the end of every Think Aloud Evaluation, we asked the user to summarize their experience of our app, and what feature that made greatest impression on them. Throughout this process, we found out what features of the app that already worked as we expected, and what features that did not work as well as we thought. This was a very helpful step in the iterative process; we could actually observe the users and follow their thoughts and actions while using the app. Thus we found out why some of the features were not user friendly.

To summarize the result form our Think Aloud Evaluations, our prototype proved to be relatively easy to use in general; especially the Audio Guide functionality were correctly interpreted. However, there were also many features that could be made more user friendly. According to our tests, there were some navigation problems in our app. Almost all users tried to click on not clickable icons/images/decorations. It was obvious that there were confused by what icons were buttons and what icons were decorations. This is something that we have to improve! We need to simplify our design, remove distracting features and decorations that does not contribute to our main Audio Guide function, and make sure that no icons can be misunderstood.

For instance, we could use more interface metaphors instead of explaining texts, change the colors, text sizes and localizations in our application to make sure that the most essential buttons/features are emphasized on the screen. We also need to make the app more horizontal, decreasing the amount of pop-up screens and depth in the app caused by the vertical screen-on-screen compositions. One idea of doing this is to remove some of the additional features. As our tests showed, the more features our app had, the more complicated and difficult to manage it became. Since the main functionality is the Audio Guide, other additional functionalities like "about the museum", "menu", etc that are not directly related to the main functionality should have reduced attention, or even be removed. Consequently, the main Audio Guide function will be even more enhanced.