ASSIGNMENT
7: HEURISTIC EVALUATION RESPONSE
As part
of our system development we were required to have another IS213
team complete a Heuristic Evaluation of the first interactive
prototype of PhotoCat. The suggestions made by the other team
are outlined in boxes below. Green stands for something our
group has defined that we will do, Orange are comments that
we believe do not promote the goals and functionality of PhotoCat,
and blue are comments we agree with but do not have time to
implement in one week’s time.
Thank you
team UHLE for your evaluation of PhotoCat
| WILL
DO |
WON'T
DO |
UNDER
CONSIDERATION |
In
the month view it is difficult to determine where the range
of the day takes place along the circle. There are 7 lines
to represent each day but what time of day does the line
represent? Is it noon or the start of the day? There should
be some indication of the range.
3 |
Team Response:
This is a labeling issue. It needs to be resolved. We assumed
that the radii would denote the start of the day—meaning
12am—but realize this should be labeled; however, we are
weary of cluttering the space with unnecessary visual noise.
While we don’t want to run the risk of violating the heuristic
guideline of minimalist design, we felt that adding the label
of “12am” to each radii would provide sufficient
information without overloading the screen with clutter.
On
the concentric circles, the week view only tells the days
of the week and not the date. While a user can calculate
the date from the range offered to the right it might be
useful to include the numerical date next to the day. Example:
Mon 14
3 |
Team Response:
This is also labeling issue. It is going to be extremely important
give users a way to know what the days they are looking at,
in a visually non-invasive and appealing way. We have resolved
this problem using dynamically-generated dates as shown below.
It
is difficult to tell what numerical date corresponds to
each of the days. For instance, on the week of 3/13/05 there
is a photo on Saturday but without rolling over the image
I have to mentally count ahead to determine that Saturday
is on the 19th. Perhaps at each circle along the line there
should be a numerical date.
3 |
Team Response:
See previous solution. We feel that we have proposed an effective
solution to this point.
When
switching between the Month, Week and Day views in the drop
down option there is no indication of where I will be going.
I assume that I will be within the range that I am currently
using but I don’t know exactly which day or week or
month range I will end up in. For example, starting at the
month view (2/27/05-3/27/05) I select day view from the
drop down menu. I end up at 3/11/05. How would I know that
before doing that?
3 |
Team Response:
I think this is of the utmost importance. If our interface is
highlighting picture organization by time we need to get this
right. Therefore, we have implemented a date range and refined
the way that time is addressed in Photocat. The “Date”
drop-down menus allow our users to specify their starting date
for all views, and our legend information next to the bullseye
further reinforces the timeframe parameters.
Grouping
pictures and organizational problem. Some of the pictures
are in the same area in very unorganized fashion and they
look very clutter. Either some of the pictures can be put
it in the one folder or could be organize different way
to avoid placing the pictures on top of each other.
3 |
Team Response:
You are right. Pictures shouldn’t overlap too much, but!
We don’t want to spend the time on the layout code to
change this over the next week.
More
indication of what the view represents (might have DAY or
WEEK, etc., as a title or something), what filters are currently
applied.
2 |
Team Response:
This is a 2 but it is important for users to know what they
are looking at. This ties in to another point about starting
date made above; we have added this additional information as
an improvement.
What
is the difference between an "album" and the "bin"?
Do we need both? Can you save an album, but not the bin?
What are the different properties of the two?
3 |
Team Response:
We will take this into serious consideration. We understand
this issue to be both conceptual and semantic. We envisioned
the bin as a temporary workspace whose contents can then be
saved into a permanent album. We’ve decided that we don’t
want to call all the saved albums “bins”—mapping
to the real world, Grandma doesn’t show the kids Photo
Bins, so we feel the Album denotation is important. The key
issue, we feel, is establishing a bridge between the two concepts.
As a solution, we will use the phrase “save bin as album.”
We will also reorder the actions in the bin so that bin-specific
actions and album-specific actions are grouped together.
It
is not quite easy to relate the relationship between terminology
and graphic representation of bull’s eye system. What
is our mental model of time? For example, in the day view,
we could perceive bull’s eye representation to be
as a clock and time descriptions (6pm, midnight, 6am, noon)
to be placed very differently (similar to clock-wise orientation,
like midnight to be north side, 6am to be at the east side,
so on) than what they are presented on the interface now.
3 |
Team Response:
While this is a noteworthy point, it might require an extensive
investigation of the design which we do not have time to implement
in one week. We will take this under advisement for future developments.
The
idea of having your photos in "piles" on the screen
is interesting and may be useful, but I found myself wanting
to drag them around—the reasoning behind the positioning
of the photos on the bulls eye is not entirely intuitive.
3 |
Team Response:
Interesting organization suggestion. The so-called “piles”
on the screen are representative of the basic function of Photocat,
as they map the images to a time-based grid to visually represent
when pictures were taken. If someone takes 5 pictures in 5 minutes,
they’re going to appear in a “pile” due to
close proximity on the screen and in time. Now, this is an interesting
point that is raised, as it goes towards future desired functionality
of Photocat. Eventually we would like to have photos on the
screen be draggable: dragging the photo to another location
would change the bullseye view of time. But we will not implement
that at this point.
If there could be user created piles the time clumping and user
dragging would compete and probably confuse.
The
concentric circles go in the order of later time to more
recent time. This corresponds to more recent times having
a smaller circle as they approach the center. Would it make
more sense to have the larger circle represent the most
recent time? I guess this depends on what photos users find
more important.
2 |
Team Response:
This is an interesting point to which we have several proposed
solutions; however, we cannot implement them in one week’s
time. One idea is to put more recent photos on the outside rings
as is suggested with older photos in the center. We would combine
this notion with variation in size of the pictures. More recent
pictures—closer in time—would be bigger and older
pictures—further away in time—would be smaller.
This could also work with the positioning as it is now, in combination
with our proposal to implement dynamically-sized bands.
Another
suggestion is that we could collapse “dead” time
on the bullseye, removing radial slices that contain no pictures,
as well as collapsing the space between bands that contain no
pictures, resulting in non-concentric circles. This would also
create more active space for photo display.
Overlapping
thumbnails in the circle are very cool but it is very hard
to use. I had a hard time knowing what pictures I was selecting.
3 |
Team Response:
While we understand this suggestion, due to limitations in building
the application we do not have time to radically improve this
in one week. So far, we have taken the following actions to
address this: we implemented a “scatter” algorithm,
so where there are wider bands, photos fall in a scattered display
as opposed to a simple overlap, freeing up more of the photo
to “grab.” This is evident on our day view in particular.
The idea is that as the timeframe becomes more refined, more
space is available to display the photos.
There
are options to create an album but I’m not sure where
to view an existing album. I see that I have albums for
Cat Photos and Vacation but I don’t know how to see
them. Would this be a photo bin option or a menu link?
3 |
Team Response:
We actually forgot to put this button on the interface. Definitely
will be changed for the next prototype
In
the enlarged view what does the plus do? Does it add an
image to an album or does it allow the user to create an
album?
3 |
Team Response:
Our intention is that the plus sign adds the picture to a pre-existing
album. This required better attention to detail and we have
changed it accordingly, as noted in the screen shot below.
I
wanted clicking on a photo to bring up the details, not
add it to the bin
2 |
Team Response:
This makes good sense…it follows the usage of other photo
utilities, and windows and mac os in general. The current interaction
is double click open details, single click add to bin. Does
this make sense? Should it be reversed?
It
would be helpful if a list of email address appear on the
menu when the user is ready to share the pictures with other
users rather than try to remember the email address of receiver.
2 |
Team Response:
This is definitely in the plan. I think we left it as a text
entry because of development issues for the first prototype.
| When
going through a year month by month using previous is cumbersome.
Should there be some sort of calendar choice? Also if a
particular month or day or week has a lot of photos will
this slow down the process of navigating as each page has
to load? (Just a technical issue I guess) |
Team Response: This is a great idea. We felt that adding a calendar
choice (like you see on airline websites, etc.) would be too much
visual noise. We feel that our implementation of the month, day,
year drop-down menus provides an elegant solution to this problem.
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