Paper Prototype User Feedback

Yesterday and today we surveyed and interviewed 6 potential users of our system - all Birmingham students, at various locations around campus. Each user was showed the card metaphor and asked to rank the control schemes in order of preference from 1 to 4. We encouraged the students to suggest improvements, or point out deficiencies where appropriate, and also got them to try on a paper prototype to get an idea of how functional each control scheme was.

Results & Analysis

Jog Dial and Buttons Comments: could be fragile, chance of accidental activation, digging into their wrists, looking silly.

When scrolling through the card metaphor, users felt that this wasn't the best idea as there was potential for the device to be uncomfortable and catch on the wrist. Users suggested a jog-dial on the front face as oppose to the side.

Buttons Only Comments: simple design, but difficult to understand, impractical for navigating lots of cards.

Although a simple idea, most users thought that repetitively pressing on a button to access friends and events wouldn't be suitable for this watch. They felt that scrolling through a large list could be time consuming, especially as all navigation had to be done in this way.

Scroll & Tap Comments: scrolling like apple devices would be intuitive, maybe with buttons on the front or side instead of tapping, maybe put the scroll bar on a watch edge, for ease of use and to preserve screen space.

This idea was quite polarising in terms of response, although still rated highly overall. Some users could see the the potential for ease of use on par with the recent ipod/iphone devices in that scrolling through large lists of users was feasible. We asked users who responded negatively if they had used touch based devices before, wondering if they had used devices where the touch screen implementation did not live up to the concept. We had some suggestions to improve the idea by replacing the sliders with equivalent jog dials on the face of the watch. It is obvious to us that some people prefer the natural feedback of 'hardware' as oppose to touch screens or track pads.

Joystick & Dual Buttons Comments - Immediate, easily understandable, probably comfortable, avoid too many buttons, left/right maybe difficult - possibly add a dial.

Users thought that scrolling through the vast amount of friends and events would be possible with this design, and selection would be simple. It was clear that this interface was immediate to a large number of our users, thanks to the popularity of Sony Ericsson phones. Even uses who did not rate it as their first device found it to be their second favourite.

The Verdict:

The control schemes we looked at focused on 3 different type of user inputs: jog dials, buttons and touch based scroll bars. As the watch has the potential for displaying relatively large lists of screens, there was a clear affinity for devices that could navigate these lists quickly. Buttons were seen as a key necessity.

Overall the most popular scheme numerically was the joy stick based device, as most users had experience of this and could see themselves scrolling through cards to get to events, select other users and perform actions reliably; much as they do on a mobile phone. We received cautions from our users to use buttons sparingly, but it is becoming clearer now what our final hardware interface will be.