I asked my wife to operate the paper prototype. When I shot the video, I had her enter the whole string. This was torturous for her — and I had her do it twice: first without the improved process and then with it.
I learned several important lessons from constructing the prototype and from her subsequent testing with it:
- It is important to cleary communicate the desired operation. In our first testing session, we forgot to use the Alpha button to jump back to the beginning of the alphabet.
- It is worthwhile to think through (or even mockup) the interaction before building the prototype. I had devised what I believed to be a clever system for scrolling through the numbers on my prototype which involved pulling a long tape of the characters through a window on the paper control panel. It was a clever idea, but it didn’t take into account the spatial orientation of the paper control panel. I had a mental model of horizontal scrolling in my head when vertical scrolling would have been much better for this application. When I discovered this flaw, I had already produced a full version of the prototype and was reluctant to fix it. As as result, it was difficult to pull the numbers horizontally past my wife’s hand without bunching them up.
Analysis
The time spent operating the prototype and then subsequently editing and uploading the videos was substantial. Although I have videos of both interactions, I have only posted the first test. Notating this interaction is quite unwieldy. After consulting with Amit, a more useful test would have been to concentrate my efforts on analyzing the part of the interaction that was particularly frustrating: having to scroll through the entire character set to get to the “.” character. Amit suggested that I could have focused simply on entering “N.S” and notating that.
I edited the process of entering “[AT]SERVER.COM” out of the video I’ve posted above and as a further extension could even edit out everything except the “N.S” of from “JOHN.SMITH”. Qualitatively, I do feel that the improvement I’ve suggested will make a big difference — especially for long strings. My wife mentioned that she doesn’t usually use the machine’s memory for long strings because they take so long to enter — and it can be difficult to remember the characters she has already entered.