Heuristic Evaluation of PhotoCat
Evaluators: Shelby Peak, Kelly Bryant,
Cecilia Kim
General Recommendations
Overall, we found PhotoCat to be an
interesting, aesthetically attractive, and potentially
quite useful application. The major layout, colors,
and logo are very pleasing to look at and professional.
We especially liked that the interface is able to
provide many useful tools without falling victim to
the temptation to add extraneous features and thus
cluttering the screen. The interface shows its best
side when it is usable without the need for any instructions-filtering
by time and date made instant sense to us, and we
feel that you were correct to privilege this metadata
in a prominent way. Your use of pop-up windows is
very good and we never found ourselves lost or "stuck"
when interacting with that part of the interface.
That said, however, we discovered
that our critiques fall into two categories. First,
we found some minor consistency and terminology issues
in the design, which should be relatively simple to
address. Occasionally, the system responded in a way
that we did not match up with our expectations; for
example, when we clicked on a photo's thumbnail, we
expected to see an enlarged version but instead the
photo was transferred to the "bin" and another
click was required to see the details of the photo.
Switching the order of these actions-i.e. opening
the details pop-up when the user first clicks the
thumbnail, then allowing the user to add the photo
to the bin from that screen-would easily solve this
problem
More critically, however, we had many
questions about the bulls-eye design which constitutes
user's major point of interaction with the system.
The circular shape only made sense to us when it represented
a 12-hour time period (i.e. the face of a clock).
In the other views, we quickly became lost when trying
to determine what the different bands and sectors
represented.
The automatic categorizing by time and place is very
useful, but mapping this onto the bulls-eye became
problematic. We would prefer to see a more familiar
representation such as a calendar or timeline. Yes,
this wouldn't be as innovative or exciting, but we
found that the effort it was taking to understand
the mapping as the interface is currently implemented
was interfering with our abilities to accomplish our
goals-locating and sharing photos.
We encourage you to continue to consider
the representation of grouped photos and perhaps rethink
the bulls-eye layout. If you are determined to pursue
the circular design, focusing on the clock metaphor
and perhaps supplementing it with a more familiar
linear representation might make the design more accessible
to users.
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