Initially users were greeted and each team member was introduced. Then we asked to the user to take a seat. The following things were mentioned to each user:
Task 1:
Task 2:
Task 3:
Task 4:
User 1:
User 1 was a lady in her 50’s who didn’t have any computer knowledge even though she had a computer at her place.
She said” I can only turn it on and off”.
When we gave her first task to play Tic-Tac-Toe she said she already knew how to play the game.
She was confused as to who should play first and asked us the same question.
She selected correct button and started playing with the computer.
She was excited when she won and exclaimed “I win”.
After that she correctly selected the exit button to end the task.
Her second task was to listen to a song from pop category.
She was very quick to click the ‘Music’ button and smiled when she saw “Please wear headphones” message.
We told her to imagine music was being played.
Our interface had a screen shot of windows media player music interface.
She confused that with a waterfall but correctly indentified the buttons i.e. play, pause and stop.
Her third task was to read information about heart but she clicked eyes button on the human anatomy.
When she realized she had made mistake by not properly reading the task we gave her, she correctly went back to the previous screen and read information about diseases related to eyes by clicking the appropriate button.
She liked the ‘loading screen ‘which we shown while the disease information was being loaded.
The fourth task was reading information about blue shield health plan.
She said she currently had Harvard health plan and performed the task correctly without any difficulty.
When we asked if she had any concerns or suggestions about the interface she said it was good, simple and easy to navigate.
User 2:
User 2 was an old lady in her 60’s who had bit difficulty in hearing.
Our home screen had welcome message stating “Welcome to health information and entertainment kiosk”.
She didn’t get meaning of the word kiosk and we had to explain her it was similar to an ATM machine.
Also we had to explain her all the operation of our application in layman’s term like instead of saying ‘click’ we had to say ‘hit or push ‘the button.
Her first task was to play Tic-Tac-Toe with the computer.
After reading all the buttons and we helping her, she selected correct ‘Play Game’ button.
She asked us if it was a normal Tic-Tac-Toe game.
She knew the game very well.
After winning first time she correctly hit settings and selected difficulty level to ‘High’ and saved the settings.
The second time the game was draw. She pointed at Krunal who was playing the computer and said “The computer is getting sneaky and this time it played fair”
The next task was to read information about eye diseases.
After thinking for a long time she finally selected the right button.
She was given a choice between 2 diseases.
She selected Dyslexia and actually started to read all the information on the printouts about the diseases.
She wanted to read more information about heart diseases.
Even though it was not mentioned in her task she went back and selected heart button and read all the information.
She was very happy and said “She always wanted to know more information about heart disease and now there was no need for her to go to the hospital just to know information since she was old and had issues in traveling.
The next task was to read information about blue cross health plan.
She said she had Harvard health plan and it was excellent.
We told her this task would help her to read information about other health plans available.
This time she selected correct button very quickly and read health plan information.
She said she didn’t have any computer knowledge still the interface was very simple for her and the navigation was good, she could just hit exit and come out any time from any task.
Also she said she enjoyed playing Tic-Tac-Toe with the computer.
User 3:
The third user was a lady in her late 50’s.
Her first task was similar to the other 2 users i.e. playing Tic-Tac-Toe game.
She asked her if she had to select buttons.
She correctly clicked the play button and selected ’X’ symbol.
She was randomly placing ‘X’ symbols.
The game was draw.
Her second task was to select any song from pop category.
She correctly selected “Summer time” song from pop category.
We told her to select help in case she was stuck, but she never felt the need to use help button.
We had static media player screen hence we had to explain her to imagine music was being played.
She selected back button came to previous screen and selected”it’s over song” after that she hit exit button.
Task 3 was to read health information about brain.
She got confused between ‘health information’, ‘health plan’ and ‘medicine reminder’ button on the main screen.
She assumed that any of the 3 buttons would take her to health information screen since all 3 buttons were related to medicine.
We helped her select correct button. She selected correct ‘brain ‘button on the anatomy picture and when given 2 options i.e. brain tumor and Alzheimer’s disease, she selected later option.
Then she asked us if she was supposed to read information on the screen.
She actually started reading all the information about the disease and asked us if she could take the printout copy which has laid on the table closer to her eyes while reading.
She was amazed after reading the information and asked us ” Is Alzheimer actually diagnosed over age of 65 years?”
After reading the entire information about the disease she hit exit button.
Task 4 was regarding information about blue cross health plan.
Initially she hit wrong button i.e. upcoming events button.
Later after getting help from the facilitator she clicked correct “health plan” button.
She said she already had blue cross insurance and didn’t like it.
Even though her task was to read information about blue cross she wanted to read more information about “Health Net” insurance health plan because she disliked “Blue cross”.
She actually read entire screen of information and was amazed by the features provided by the health plan.
When we asked her about the general application design and interface, she said “That was easy” even though she didn’t have any computer knowledge.
Based on the observations we made, we have been prompted by the users to make in some of the following changes to the design: