CS 615

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CS 615 Final PresentationThe Personal Advisor
Team

• By
• Omar Bukhari
• Anastasiya Smirnova
• Vadim Platonov
• Daniel Koulomzin

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The Personal Advisor

• The interface is designed to make the process of
  registration faster and more convenient.
• Simple and designed to cater the user needs i.e.
  students.

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After the first presentation ..

• The first presentation displayed how we started,
  what decisions we made, how we carried out tests.
• It also highlighted our first interactive
  prototype.

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Looking back at our first design
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Looking back

• Even though we spent a lot of time thinking and
  then designing our first prototype there was room
  for a lot of improvement. Here is one screen
  which we thought would need improvement for our
  second interactive prototype.

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Getting ready for the final thing..

• Once we were done with the first prototype and
  then the presentation we were left with improving
  what we had already done. Three major things
  needed to be done
• The Heuristic evaluation
• The usability study
• Integrating everything to come up with the final
  prototype.

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The Heuristic Evaluation

• Before our interface was evaluated by the
  Sathishs group (the online book store) we were
  quite happy with what we had!
• But when we saw the evaluation and what had to be
  improved it did annoy us a little( sure!) but at
  the same time helped us pinpoint any short
  comings.

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The Heuristic Evaluation

• In fact the fixes that we made really improved
  the interface. Here we go
• 1. Problem 1 H1-2 Match between System and
  Real World (Severity Rating 3)
• No login page is provided. Slides provided
  by the group indicate that login is one of the
  tasks that the users will perform. Design of the
  website does not indicate that such facility will
  be provided once the user selects to register
  into certain classes. There is a conspicuous
  absence of the registration page.

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This is what the old login page looked like

• Even though we had the login page we forgot to
  link it. Here is what it looked like

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Problem 2 H1-2 Match between System and Real
World Severity 3On the course description
page, the Type Class text field is ambiguous
and confusing. Does type mean class name, class
number or a combination of both?
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Heuristic Evaluation contd

• 3. Problem 3 H1-2 Match between System and
  Real World Severity 2
• The combination of Number of Classes and Days
  on the class registration page is confusing. Are
  we talking about the maximum number of classes a
  day here, or minimum? Are classes that have
  sections that fall on selected and non selected
  days filtered out?

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Adding a rating
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The Usability Test

• In order to carry out the usability tests we
  needed to find people who would be willing to put
  in time and honestly go over the interface.

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Usability Testing

• The testers were
• Iti Behari a Umass Boston Computer Science
  freshman.
• Tuan Pham A high-level computer user. He is a
  transfer student from the University of
  California, Berkley.
• Neha Garg A senior Computer Science student
  with good computer skills.
• Boris a sophomore

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Task Analysis

• Login
• Creating a schedule
• ? Registration known selection
• ? Registration clueless
• ? Drop classes
• See course descriptions

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Task Analysis, contd

• Rating? View rating for Professors and Classes
• ? Share your experience with other students
  anonymously (We know that Professors will hate us
  for this but remember that the system is to
  benefit students).

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Design Decisions

• Used our highly artistic abilities create
  numerous paper based prototypes.
• Set up scenarios for users to go through.
• Iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate .

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Problems the users encountered

• There were not a lot of problems the users
  encountered
• One concern users had was that we did not not any
  help documentation.
• Pages should describe what they are for.

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User Timing

• Since we did not link our interface we were not
  able to carry out time analysis
• Login 0.45 s
• Creating a schedule 3 mins
• Dropping classes 1 min
• Add rating 2 mins

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What we learned?

• We learned that users may not always be right,
  and they can be bad critics since they always
  want things catered.
• Users never read instructions carefully.
• We should spend a lot of time testing with
  potential users.
• Users tend to assume how features work.
• Never ask your family or friends to help out.
  They only complicate the situation and never tell
  you any of the problems.

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To view our interface

• www.cs.umb.edu/nastya