Week 13 Update

This Week

This week, we completed the testing analysis, which describes the results that our team got from last week's activity. We split the analysis up into sections for each team member to do on a Google Drive file. The analysis contains the data gathered from the testing (such as the participant information and the testing metrics), as well as correlations, analysis, and conclusions based off of the data.

Overall

Task: Testing Analysis

People Involved: All team members

Hours: 1-2 hours per member

Next Week

Next week, we will be updating and making changes to our program based on the results of the testing analysis and then releasing it. We will also create a presentation of our project as well as the testing results and analysis, to be presented in front of the class.

Challenges, Risks, and Issues

Challenges

Because of the extreme difficulty of the level five problems (which only one participant not giving up), our test results were heavily skewed. This made it challenging to write an accurate analysis.

Week 12 Update

This Week:

This week our team has worked on user testing. We split into two teams of two and conducted user testing on various test subjects, according to the format outlined in our test plan. Each team initially welcomed and briefed the participant and had them sign a consent form. The participant then filled out a pre-test survey. Following that was the actual testing of the product using our four previously defined HTAs (Hierarchical Task Analysis). Finally, the participant completed a post-test survey and was thanked for their participation. During the core testing, our two team members kept detailed notes including time to complete each task and number of positive or negative statements. Through all of this testing we gathered a lot of interesting information which we look forward to analyzing next week.

Overall:

Task: User Testing

People involved: All team members

Hours: 2-3 hrs per team member

Task: Start User Testing Analysis Document

People involved: Conor and Danielle

Hours: 0.5 hr each

Next Week:

In the next week we are going to be analyzing our user testing results and refining our design based on that analysis. We expect the analysis to take approximately 2 to 3 hours per team member, with all team members participating. We expect design refinement to take an additional 2 to 3 hours per member.

Challenges, Risks, and Issues:

Challenges: 

A challenge recently has been to gather a diverse group of users for the user testing. Our team ended up with participants of less diversity than desired, which may impact results.

Risks: 

As mentioned in the challenges section, one risk recently is that our user testing base is not diverse enough and will skew results. Another risk related to testing involved one of our tests being too difficult, resulting in many participants skipping through that particular test. This has a very obvious affect on our data. Our team is debating whether to remove the test, redo testing, or leave the data as is and include detailed write up analysis on the results.

Issues: 

The only notable issue recently is the faulty test, as mentioned in the risks section.

Week 10 Update

This Week:

This week a lot of the usability errors that were found during the heuristic evaluation. Thanks to our use of the functional prototype we got really good feedback and all comments were made on a product that could be the final user interface with some polishing.

We have been focusing on getting ready for the actual testing and team members have been trying to get more users to include in our testing plan.

Overall:

Task: Readme/Product prototype release
People involved: All team members
Hours: .5 hrs per team member

Task: Product

People involved: All team members

Hours: 0.2 hr per team member

Next Week:

Next week we will need to focus on finalizing the users, and making sure that everything is ready before we test. Also, it will be important to get the login system done before we test so we can get feedback on it.

Challenges, Risks, and Issues:

Challenges: 

Our team has been finding it extremely difficult to find users. Due to our app being applicable to anyone from the ages of 5-18 we have a large range of both computer and math competence. We realize that we will only be able to test on a limited subset of our users, but still worry about complete user demographic coverage. Unfortunately due to the current situation (being in college) of all the members on the team, we don't really know anyone from the area that is in our user demographic.

Risks: 

We are still encountering the same risk as last week, where as the semester is speeding up team members may re-prioritize classes/other activities ahead of this project. This is still being mitigated by getting early starts on deliverables and continuing to have weekly team meetings regardless if the deliverable is due that week.
An additional risk arises because of two main factors - team members are becoming busier and more focused on other classes and projects, and we are completing work for this project more and more on an individual basis. We run into a risk that a section of some document may reference a new or updated feature or design that the rest of the team is unaware about. We are attempting to mitigate this by finding time to read or glance over each others sections and putting personal responsibility on updating others if an issue arises.