Rethinking the App

Hey all,

Before the conferences we wrapped up our usability tests and now that we've returned from San Francisco and Washington we've had time to really consider the test results and the feedback we received.  We created a summary of the data and the changes that we want to consider making to the project based on what we saw and what the subjects told us.

While we have a lot of ideas on things that we might want to change, remove, and add, we decided to pick a couple of the smaller more manageable ones to work on as the school year draws to an end.  Over the summer we will take on the larger changes and tasks.

Icons

Some of the small things that we've been working on are remaking some of the icons that the subjects had difficulty identifying, seeing, or selecting. This was a pretty simple fix with photoshop but hopefully it will make our icons much more visibly accessible than they were during the testing process.


Zooming

Another change we realized we'd need to make after the usability tests was that something had to be done about our tap to zoom method.  The usabiity tests showed that the method was unintuitive, less accurate, and the way that we handled zooming out actually conflicted with accepted zooming conventions.  In Safari, we were informed by one of our test subjects, a double tap (when you're at max zoom) will bring you out to the non-zoomed page.  We do not want the gestures in our app to have unexpected consequences or to conflict with the already existing conventions of zooming in iOS.  As a result, we've decided to remove the tap to zoom functionality and instead use that code for the zoom in and zoom out buttons we have in the app.

While the tap method was largely disliked by the test subjects, several subjects pointed out that it was nice in that there were set intervals that it would zoom to and the pinch method of zooming does not really account for that.  As a result, we're going to use the tap to zoom logic with our icons and have them zoom in and out at set intervals for the user.

Annotation for Note Taking

One of the biggest concerns the subjects expressed was that the notebox, with either the virtual keyboard or the physical keyboard, would not be sufficient for taking notes in class. With the virtual keyboard it was too difficult (typing with two fingers instead of being able to use homerow.  If you try to type with multiple fingers you will often accidentally activate the built in zooming that the iPad provides), or too slow for subjects to use.  The physical keyboard on the other hand could not provide the symbols that students would need to use when taking math or science notes.

The subjects almost all initially believed that the app could be used to tag notes onto certain parts of the lecture, and would try dragging the note box onto the lecture screen.

To try and address both of these very valid points we've decided to try implementing a way for the student to be able to just write notes directly onto the lectures. While we're still working on figuring out how we will save the notes in regards to the lecture, Abhishek has made a test application where you can use a stylus and take/erase notes onto the screen and we will likely be able to use that functionality in our app once we figure out how we want it to work and how we will store the data.

In Conclusion....

While we won't start the hardcore development until the summer, we still have some interesting things we're going to be working on over the next two weeks so stick around and we'll let you know how we're doing and where we're going to be at once summer starts.

-Lindsey