Test Tasks & Scenarios Scenario 1: UT Austin Campus: From Hand-Drawn Map to Formal Map Imagine you are a new student on the UT Austin campus in the summer of 2007. You are still becoming oriented, and are trying to get both formal and useful information about navigating the campus from trusted sources. One afternoon, you are studying at the PCL Library. You have your trusted LiveMap in your bookbag, and see a friend walk by. You flag the friend down for directions. 1. On a blank, new map space, have your friend draw you a route to the Music School, where you've never been before, from where you are now (the PCL library). 2. Now that you have a sketch, you'd like some more context, particularly at the street level, to support your friend's map (and to check the streets that you already know). Integrate a streetmap of campus into this hand-drawn map. 3. Now, you are on your way, walking from the PCL to the Music Building. You can afford to take some time to explore and stop along the way. You would like to see study spots on campus where you might stop on this route in the future. Search for and integrate a study spots map into your LiveMap. 4. Now that you have walked the route, you notice a sign that says that the music building closes at 8 on Wednesday. Make a note of this on your map, and save the map as "mapToMusicBldg". |
Scenario 2: Mueller, Austin: From Formal Maps to Adding a Drawn Map Now, you are planning an exploratory trip to the Mueller Airport Redevelopment in Austin. You'll be heading there in a few days to check out the first phase of new housing that is being built. You have no context for this area, which is undeveloped as of yet, except for knowing that the only major landmark to date is the Dell Children's Hospital. Talking to a friend who lives up the street from the redevelopment, you ask him to sketch a quick map for you, to guide your exploration. 1. Begin by loading a map of the Mueller airport redevelopment into LiveMap, to provide a starting point for your friend. 2. Have him draw a route for you from the Dell Children's Hospital to the new row houses being built for Phase I. 3. Select the row houses on the map and save the detailed area as "MuellerRowHouses_map". 4. Now that you have a rough schematic of the planned development, you want to see what the area looks like from above so that you can see the surrounding neighborhood density and look for other landmarks to guide your trip. Return to the main map view and add the satellite layer of the area to the map. 5. This provides a great deal of detail, but you determine that it's too much to be useful to you, especially since the satellite images are outdated. Remove this layer. |
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Select Outcomes, Findings & Observations For full notes, see our raw user data. - Ordering is important with layers, especially understanding how to interact with individual layers, whether "draw" or "map". - Doesn't understand the difference between New Map and Clear Layer, when there's only one layer. - Delete versus Clear causes serious confusion. - Desire for an "Undo" button to remove most recent action is strong with all participants. - The "somewhere else" pre-filled text in the search box, versus the "Here" button, is really confusing. Why isn't the default always "here"? Can the explanatory text do a better job of telling the user what to write in? - Question: "Does the map try to synch my drawing with maps that it's pulling in?" This is a request for a "snap to" sort of feature that happens by default when a formal map layers with a drawn map. - Future destination versus current location as two separate sets of tasks (related to where I am now versus planning for a future trip to another location). - List of Related Maps is "cool" - "Find" is the "Go" button (just call it "go") - Organize all buttons in the sub-menu to the right of the input field - major grouping problem with this menu whenever there's a text input field. - A "help" option would really support problem-solving activities. - Wants a "you are here" sort of label when a map geo-locates her. - To her, delete means removing a saved map from the device/system, while clear means removing a layer or map from view. - Layers could/should have interactivity, such as highlighting a building. That's currently not possible, but may be an important requirement that was overlooked. - Make sure to identify the active tab for the active layer, so it's always clear where the action is occurring..
Now that I've used it, I would like LiveMap to... - Offer a search box for ambient info...would search saved maps (rather than Get Map - it's a different type of search). - Email a map to someone who doesn't have a LiveMap device, without actually having to "share" it with the world (maybe a "private" setting). - Print a LiveMap directly to my printer via wireless printing. - Share a series of turn-by-turn maps, that would collect a bunch of maps at different scale so that I could trace a route. - Give me features to fully support tourism, emergency situations, public transport use, weather, & traffic. |
User Testing Video Clips |
