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Want to test out a user interface?
Quethal
The InfrequentOaklandRegistered User regular
The InfrequentOaklandRegistered User regular
Hey there everyone! I am in a User Interfaces class in my Computer Science department here at the University of Oregon. I'm working in a group, and we have come up with a system to help learn what makes a good, usable interface. The product is a recipe website where users can (currently) add a recipe, and search for recipes by ingredients. So, let's say you are hungry, and have a limited selection of food in your kitchen; you can find out what sort of recipes use those ingredients.
Anyhow, we need to test it out on people, and I was hoping to do some of this testing online. We already did some testing in a lab setting, but as we have studied different types of user testing, I would like to try more than just one, to compare results. I have a set of instructions at the end of this, and if anyone would like to help out and try something for fun, I would greatly appreciate it. It should take you no more than about 10 to 15 minutes or so, unless you want to have a lot of fun and add a really complex recipe (in which case, go ahead!
Once you are done, compose an e-mail with the subject line "Recipe Website Responses" and send it to kspradli@uoregon.edu In the body of the e-mail, fill out the 8 questions at the end of the instructions.
Thank you in advance, everyone! I look forward to your responses!
As you go through this test, you will take two different courses of action. During the first part, you will be a person who is adding one of your favorite recipes to the website. During the second part, you will be someone coming to the website to search for a recipe (and it will just happen to be the recipe your alternate personality submitted previously).
These instructions will tell you what you want to do, though they are purposefully not specific; you will be told what you want to do, but not where to click or where to enter information. We are not testing you or your ability to complete these tasks; we are testing how easy our website is to use. If you get stuck, do not worry - that is our error.
Thank you very much for your time, and we hope you like our system!
Part 1:
Here is the homepage for the website:
http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/~abetz/443/p5
You have used our site before, and want to add a recipe to it. Feel free to add what you want; it can be something very simple (such as, a sliced apple) to very complex (Hollandaise sauce, or a complete turkey dinner). While I recommend something more simple in order to save time, feel free to have fun.
As you go through adding your recipe, pay attention to a couple things. One, take note of what parts of the site are not structured how you would expect them to be, things that slow you down, or anything misleading. For example, if you click somewhere, expecting something to happen, and nothing happens, make a note of it. Two, try to realize what aspects of the site are helpful, fluent, and intuitive. This can be more difficult, as if you are not having trouble, nothing may stand out. It is alright if you cannot point to anything in particular that is helpful.
Finally, make sure you remember one or two of the ingredients you use in your recipe, for the next part of this evaluation.
Part 2:
Now, you are a hungry person. You have a kitchen with various ingredients, but you want to use one or two of them in particular. Try to find the recipe you submitted in part one by searching for recipes with one or two of the ingredients in your recipe. For example, if you entered a recipe for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you could try searching for “peanut butter†and “breadâ€.
Responses:
Once finished with both parts, please answer the following questions as you are able to help us understand how to improve upon our interface.
1: What is the name of the recipe you submitted?
2: What errors did you encounter when filling out the “Create a New Recipe†form?
3: Were you able to follow the steps in adding a recipe, or were there things that mislead you, or caused you to take the wrong action?
4: Did you encounter any errors after submitting your recipe? If so, what did you do?
5: In Part 2, what did you use for your search?
6: Did you find your recipe right away? If not, did you continue searching, and what did you do differently? Were you able to find your recipe?
7: What is your overall impression of the fluidity of the website? Did you feel you were easily able to move from step to step, or was the site confusing and counterintuitive?
8: What other suggestions can you make? What parts did you like, and what could be improved?
Anyhow, we need to test it out on people, and I was hoping to do some of this testing online. We already did some testing in a lab setting, but as we have studied different types of user testing, I would like to try more than just one, to compare results. I have a set of instructions at the end of this, and if anyone would like to help out and try something for fun, I would greatly appreciate it. It should take you no more than about 10 to 15 minutes or so, unless you want to have a lot of fun and add a really complex recipe (in which case, go ahead!
Once you are done, compose an e-mail with the subject line "Recipe Website Responses" and send it to kspradli@uoregon.edu In the body of the e-mail, fill out the 8 questions at the end of the instructions.
Thank you in advance, everyone! I look forward to your responses!
As you go through this test, you will take two different courses of action. During the first part, you will be a person who is adding one of your favorite recipes to the website. During the second part, you will be someone coming to the website to search for a recipe (and it will just happen to be the recipe your alternate personality submitted previously).
These instructions will tell you what you want to do, though they are purposefully not specific; you will be told what you want to do, but not where to click or where to enter information. We are not testing you or your ability to complete these tasks; we are testing how easy our website is to use. If you get stuck, do not worry - that is our error.
Thank you very much for your time, and we hope you like our system!
Part 1:
Here is the homepage for the website:
http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/~abetz/443/p5
You have used our site before, and want to add a recipe to it. Feel free to add what you want; it can be something very simple (such as, a sliced apple) to very complex (Hollandaise sauce, or a complete turkey dinner). While I recommend something more simple in order to save time, feel free to have fun.
As you go through adding your recipe, pay attention to a couple things. One, take note of what parts of the site are not structured how you would expect them to be, things that slow you down, or anything misleading. For example, if you click somewhere, expecting something to happen, and nothing happens, make a note of it. Two, try to realize what aspects of the site are helpful, fluent, and intuitive. This can be more difficult, as if you are not having trouble, nothing may stand out. It is alright if you cannot point to anything in particular that is helpful.
Finally, make sure you remember one or two of the ingredients you use in your recipe, for the next part of this evaluation.
Part 2:
Now, you are a hungry person. You have a kitchen with various ingredients, but you want to use one or two of them in particular. Try to find the recipe you submitted in part one by searching for recipes with one or two of the ingredients in your recipe. For example, if you entered a recipe for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you could try searching for “peanut butter†and “breadâ€.
Responses:
Once finished with both parts, please answer the following questions as you are able to help us understand how to improve upon our interface.
1: What is the name of the recipe you submitted?
2: What errors did you encounter when filling out the “Create a New Recipe†form?
3: Were you able to follow the steps in adding a recipe, or were there things that mislead you, or caused you to take the wrong action?
4: Did you encounter any errors after submitting your recipe? If so, what did you do?
5: In Part 2, what did you use for your search?
6: Did you find your recipe right away? If not, did you continue searching, and what did you do differently? Were you able to find your recipe?
7: What is your overall impression of the fluidity of the website? Did you feel you were easily able to move from step to step, or was the site confusing and counterintuitive?
8: What other suggestions can you make? What parts did you like, and what could be improved?
Quethal on
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How do you make it?
Also, thanks to those who have helped out so far! If a few more people would be willing to try this out, my group and I would greatly appreciate it.
2.
a) Tabbing through the ingredients section travels down the the ingredients column, then the quantity column, etc. rather than tabbing through one row at a time as I would have expected.
b) Entering anything besides a number in the quantity field causes an error when submitting the recipe. This, combined with the fact that selecting a unit in the dropdown is mandatory, makes it impossible to submit any recipe that contains any ingredient in a unit that is not in the dropdown box. For example, I have a recipe that starts "Take one side of beef and seventeen chickens...". For the cranberry sauce, I was unable to enter "1 grapefruit" because the unit must be selected.
It also makes it impossible to enter quantities as fractions, such as 1/2 cup, which is far more standard than seeing "0.5 cups".
d) Encountering an error on page submission gives you a page which has the name, description, and prep time for your recipe, but from which all ingredients and instructions have been erased. This is inexcusable.
3. The steps themselves were pretty simple and clearly laid out, aside from my above concerns.
4. Fixed the errors. For the amount of cranberries, I put 12 oz. rather than one package. For the grapefruit, I specified a unit of cups despite the fact that the unit should be, in fact, in grapefruits.
5. I tested it using "cranberries" first, then tried "water", "sugar", and "grapefruit".
6. Yes, I was able to find it immediately. However, I found several problems with the search feature:
a) Entering an ingredient then hitting the enter key does not search properly, as expected, but takes you to a page stating "no ingredients added!"
b) There is no way to search the title of a recipe. This seems like an oversight.
c) The searching seems to rely on exact pattern matching. I accidentally entered a ` character when entering grapefruit the last time, and thus a search for "grapefruit" as an ingredient does not find the recipe.
7. The overall design seems fluid and intuitive, but some of the minor details really need work before the site is idiot-proof.
8. Commenting doesn't currently work - it's attempting to access viewRecipe.html rather than viewRecipe.php. For the rest, see above.
Edit: Also, when you view the recipe again the ingredients seem to have been sorted in alphabetical order. For large recipes where ingredients are listed in order of use this would get slightly annoying.