Visibility of System Status
There is room for improvement in this area for the input device, in particular making notification messages consistent across all changes and providing error messages for invalid input. There should also be feedback for incomplete information (e.g. a weight value was specified without any indication of units).
The watch is particularly weak for this heuristic, as there is no indication on the watch of its current state (e.g. is it making a call, is it actually working, etc).
Match between System and Real World
We found that the Derek persona could not understand some of the words which didn't seem too technical at first (e.g. settings, edit, main menu, etc). These need to be replaced with more suitable terms.
User Control and Freedom
Confirmation screens are used to help the user recover from a mistake, but undo could also be used after a user has saved information, to ensure they don't have to navigate menus.
Consistency and Standards
The system overall is pretty consistent, with colour coding and images used to group tasks. The use of back buttons could be made clearer, and a distinction should be made between going back a page and going all the way back to the main menu.
Error Prevention
One example we found where error prevention could be implemented is by disabling the "Continue" button if an input screen is blank, forcing the user to write something.
Recognition rather than Recall
The menus carry over important information from one screen to the next (e.g. confirmation screens contain information about what is actually being confirmed). Instructions are also available on the second screen on every page.
Flexibility and Efficiency of Use
The speech input aspect can be seen as a way to increase efficiency, particularly as our walkthroughs showed that more confident users are more willing to use it. The operation of this feature should not be made obvious to novices, so they don't get bogged down in different navigation methods.
Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
Text on screen is kept to a minimum, with more elaborate descriptions available in the contextual instructions.
Help Users Recognise, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors
As mentioned before, the initial prototype did not take into account error management for irregular input, and this should be an important part of the revised prototype.
Help and Documentation
There is a large amount of contextual help, but the initial prototype does not mention the main instruction manual. This needs to cover the operation of the watch, as well as how to perform basic multi-screen tasks using the input device.
Colour Blindness
The web application Vischeck lets you see how images appear to people with three different types of colour blindness. Some colour blindness issues were found in the interface, in particular the use of different colours to highlight important text. As an alternative, this text should also be made distinctive in another way (e.g. bolding or italics). Below is an example menu ran through Vischeck:
Fitts' Law
The interface is less vulnerable to Fitts' Law due to the use of a touch screen, so a user can access any part of the screen equally quickly.
Learnability
We found that general navigation was very easy to learn, and improvements in text language and consistency should reduce the learning curve further. The watch however had a steeper learning curve considering the small amount of interaction required.
Visible Navigation
There is limited visible navigation in the interface, with images used to remind the user of the section they are in, but they cannot view information about where exactly they are, they have to remember it.
No comments:
Post a Comment