Halfway through summer!

Hello everyone!

Last week Alex mentioned that our professor wanted us to begin working towards our second round of usability testing.  If you recall, our first round of usability testing was focused on the user interface, note-taking, icons, and the multi-touch gestures we can use for navigation. The tests went very well, and gave us a direction to move in with our application as development began.  Since then, we have worked a great deal on the application and it has become very...well...legit looking! A lot of the initial functionality we wanted to see in the application has been implemented, the note-taking system was revamped, and we were finally able to stream real lectures to the iPad.


And so, another round of usability tests were suggested. I'm a fan of the cyclical nature our development has taken, gathering requirements, developing, testing, using the feedback to further polish the system, and so on.  We want to make sure that the direction we've taken since our last tests was the right direction to take! That's why last week we developed new activities for the usability test, wrote up new pre-activity and post-activity questions, and completely rewrote our test script.  We also had to modify some of our code so that the application saved the users notes to the iPad's photo gallery (previously we were saving images on the desktop so that we could look at them easily). A couple of other minor changes were made (adding a clear all button to the the note screen, adding more feedback for the user so they can tell when they've saved something, adding an about page that has information about the developers/special thanks to CRA, etc) and we also created a new logo (seen above). It's supposed to be a whiteboard with a couple of markers and then the project name.  We wanted to have something nice to display on the home screen of the app.


Alex and I also came in on Saturday to make up some time we missed, and we worked on writing a "Related Work" section for a paper about this project.  We were unable to write a paper for the ASSETS conference this year but there are other conferences during the next academic year, and next years Access Lecture team might want to submit a paper for ASSETS.


This week we began the usability tests.  We were able to schedule two people for today, and there are four people scheduled to come in tomorrow. For our last round of tests we had 8 test subjects, and this time we'd like to get an even larger data pool. We appealed to one of the Computer Science professors that is here over the summer doing research with students and a couple of his students seemed interested in being test subjects.


The two tests we ran today went well, but wasn't a surprise because we've now had a bit of experience doing usability testing. Alex and I conducted the first usability test, and then Abhishek and I conducted the second test. We're already starting to see some issues pop up that didn't occur to us when we used the application, but we've also gotten some positive responses about things we've changed since the last round of tests, so it's very satisfying.


We'll update you guys more after we've finished up with our tests and looked at the data. So far it seems like we're going to have a lot of interesting things to consider about the application and where we're going with it.


Lindsey