InformalPrototype:Study Buddy

From IEOR 170 Spring 2007

1 Introduction and Mission Statement
2 Roles
3 Prototype
4 Method
5 Results
6 Discussion
7 Appendix

[edit] Introduction and Mission Statement

Moffitt Library and the Main Stacks are especially crowded during finals week when students would make frequent and extended visits to the library to study for their exams. As a result, students always have a hard time finding open seats to study during finals week. The main goal of our project is to provide a solution for the seating problems in Moffitt Library and the Main Stacks during finals week when seats are in high demand. Our solution involves introducing an multifunctional, interactive machine called “Study Buddy” at the entrance and on each floor of the libraries. Study Buddy allows our target users, including library staffs and undergraduate and graduate students from all major fields, to complete the following desired tasks with one or few clicks at the interface screens:

1.Locate available seats in the library
2.Check for open computers on 1st floor Moffitt’s computer lab
3.Form study group
4.Locate seats close to books of interest
5.Check if all students have left the library after working hours 
6.Find out where your friend is studying!

[edit] Roles

Role of each team member in the assignment:

1.Ben Lam a.In charge of the introduction and mission statement and prototype description b.Designed user interface screens c.Worked on the appendix

2.Onyi Lam a.Worked on the appendix b.In charge of the methods

3.Win Cheung a.Designed user interface screens b.Summarized the results from the experiments

4.Luciana Cook a.Designed user interface screens b.Discussed the results from the experiment

5.Karena Wong a.Designed user interface screens b.Worked on the methods section

[edit] Prototype

To design our low-fidelity prototype for Study Buddy, we used Microsoft Paint to make quick designs and sketches of our user interface screens. We limited the use of color in our prototype and focused on the higher-level interactions instead, such as the main functions of Study Buddy that a potential user will likely to use. We have also incorporated the option of help and support for clarifying any potential problems that the user may have while operating Study Buddy. The first interface screen that the user will be presented with after swiping his or her Cal student ID is shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Main interface screen with five options to choose from.

The user will make the selection based on his or her preferences. If the user decides to reserve an available seat to study, he or she can choose the option “find a seat.” For further descriptions on the interface screens that follow from choosing this option, please see the appendix section.

At the end of all seat reservations, if performed successfully, the following screen will appear as shown in Figure 2. This serves as a feedback/confirmation page for our prototype. Also note that the user can make his or her information private if desired.

Figure 2. Confirmation page for seat reservation.

If the user decides to create a study group, simply follow the four steps in Figure 7 in the appendix. First, the user will click on “create a study group,” then the user will choose which subject to create a study group for. Next, the user will specify the course department and number, and finally, the user will select the seat that he or she will like the study group to be held.

If the user wants to find a seat based on his or her research interest, the user will have to first click “find a seat,” then choose “by research interest.” This will then present the user with the interface screen shown in Figure 11 in the appendix where the user will select the desired study subject. Finally, the user can proceed with the seat reservation process based on the current seat availability.

If the user decides to search for a student or friend at the library, he or she can select the corresponding option at the main interface screen. The user will need to type in the student’s name on the corresponding spaces to perform a search, as shown in Figure 8 in the appendix.

If the particular student is in the library, the user will be shown the exact location of where the student is currently studying, as shown in Figure 9-1 in the appendix. If the student that the user is looking for is not in the library, the user will be shown the interface screen in Figure 9-2 in the appendix.

If all the user wants is to check for computer availability on 1st floor Moffitt Library, he or she can select the option “computer availability” at the main interface screen. This will bring the user to the interface screen shown in Figure 10 in the appendix and provide the user with the information needed.

The last option that the user of Study Buddy can choose from is “head count.” This option provides the user with the information of the number of students remaining in the library. In fact, this option will be the most beneficial for library staffs to determine how many students are remaining in the library after work hours.

[edit] Method

Participants:

Participants are selected in random at the library entrance but they fit into the three persona types that we have defined in the previous group assignment. They include an undergraduate student, a graduate student, and a library staff.

Participant I: Undergraduate 3rd year, Interdisciplinary Studies Major
Participant II: Library staff and undergraduate student: He has worked in the library for three months. 
Participant III: Graduate student in the Boalt Hall School of Law

Testing Environment:

We conducted our study at the entrance of Moffitt at 10pm on Monday. Since we think that Study Buddy is going to locate at the entrance of the library and at every floor, we thought that it would be most appropriate to conduct our study there. There was a constant flow of people coming in and leaving the library and that raised the concern that a queue might build up at the device. People also appeared to be really busy and Study Buddy must be quick and easy to use. There were two staffs working at the entrance at the time but with Study Buddy, we could at least eliminate one staff.

Tasks:

We have chosen three tasks in total: one easy, one moderate, and one hard task. The easy task is to find computer availability on the first floor of Moffitt. This can be done in one step and on the interface screen, it will list the available computers. The moderate task is to create or find a study group in the library. It entails four steps in total. To create a study group, users will be able to reserve the whole table. The hard task is to find a seat near to the user’s research interest. It takes three steps to locate an open seat near the area of interests. What makes this task hard is that it can be confusing when choosing a specific study area as many areas are multidisciplinary.

Role of each team member in the experiment:

Observers: to take notes of the whole interview process and make a log of critical incidents -->Onyi and Win

Greeter: to welcome the participants and explain to them the interview procedure --> Ben and Win

Facilitator: to guide the users through tasks and provide assistance if needed --> Luciana

Computer: to arrange the prototype in response to the user’s input --> Karena

Participant in practice interview: to help the team understand user’s logic and prepare for subsequent interviews --> Onyi

Testing Procedure:

1.Greeter welcomes a participant and explains the objective of our study.

2.Greeter will demonstrate and explain how the procedure runs.

3.Facilitator will ask a participant to do the 3 different tasks we have assigned; they are a) to find computer availability, b) to create a study group, and c) to find a seat near to one’s research interest.

4.In each task, the computer should show every step that a participant will have chosen. The computer should NOT answer any questions, and should NOT assist the participant.

5.In each task, two observers will record what they have observed from a participant; for example, how he/she will react, the number of errors during the experiment, and the time needed to complete each task.

6.In the first task, to find computer availability, a participant should select “computer availability” in the main interface screen.

7.A participant will be able to see which computer is available, but they will not be able to reserve any available computer using Study Buddy.

8.In the second task, to create a study group, a participant should select “to create/find a study group” in the main interface screen.

9.A participant will choose which subject he/she is going to create a study group.

10.A participant will be able to find an available seat.

11.In the third task, to find a seat near to one’s research interest, participant should select “find a seat” in the main interface screen.

12.A participant will choose the subject of books that he/she is looking for.

13.A participant will be able to find an available seat near the books of interest.

14.After finishing the three tasks, we will ask the participant a few questions about: - how they feel about the experiment, - how they like the three different tasks, - what comments they have about the experiment.

Test Measures:

We measure the performance and the efficiency of our system by counting the number of errors throughout the interview, and the time it takes the user to complete each task. Because of the nature of the tasks, the order of tasks is important to our studies. We arrange our tasks in order of difficulty (from easy to hard), and we expect that the time it takes for each task is about the same. This is because when the user becomes comfortable with the system, it will take him/her less time to complete the task.

[edit] Results

Among the three participants, only one of them had made a mistake when performing the tasks, specifically during the 2nd task (moderate level).

The average time needed for the participants to successfully finish the task was calculated and summarized in the figure below:

It is expected that the task processing time will be longer for harder task. However, the data shows that it took a longer time for the users to finish the moderate task comparing to the hard task.

The three participants’ comments and suggestions to each task are summarized below:

[edit] Discussion

The experiment is very useful when determining the strength and weakness of our product, Study Buddy. When we created our low fidelity prototype we made a lot of assumptions and by doing so, there were a few things that were unclear to the user. For example we observed that user 1 had a hard time understanding why she needed to reserve a seat after creating a study group (2nd task). User 1 was not sure if she was reserving a seat or an area for the study group.

Like many experiments, every user will have different reactions and user 2 felt that the 2nd task, creating a study group was the easiest. He said he felt it was really straightforward. This user was a student but he was also a library staff. This made me think of the possibility that maybe he felt it was easy because he worked at the library, unlike the 1st user. This is only a hypothesis that can’t be proven but could possibly help us improve Study Buddy.

User 1 expressed that she thought that a crowd could be created while using Study Buddy. While timing each user, we noticed that on average a task was finished in less than a minute. Our team predicts that students do not usually do more than one task at a time and therefore the wait time between each user should be around one minute. This time issue can be minimized if we add more machines in the entrance. In order to find what would be the optimal number of machines we can conduct another experiment to estimate about how many people come into the library at a given time. We think that this is only a minor problem.

User 3 felt that when viewing the available computers there should be a distinction on whether the computer is a Mac or a PC since some students have a preference on the computer type. This was interesting to note since none of us had thought about making this distinction. The team feels that this is a minor problem that can easily be fixed just by adding a small feature. In addition, User 3 had a lot to say about task 3, which was to find a seat near an area of research interest. He felt that the method we created on how to find the areas was not detailed enough. He felt that sometimes when you do research the books you need are not necessarily in one section and that most research topics require you to explore different areas.

For the same task, user 1 felt that this option might not be as useful to students being that most student just check out books and start working on their research away from the library once they have all the books. She felt that most people tend not to write research papers in the library; they usually go home with all the books they need and do their work there. We took these comments into our consideration and concluded that perhaps this option might not be useful for the students unless it is highly detailed. The graduate student was the one who we felt would use this tool the most since he had a lot of comments about it. The team feels that we either improve it so that it meets the demand of graduate students or we remove this feature from Study Buddy. In order to determine which option we should choose, we concluded that we must conduct additional experiments in the future that only deal with this issue.

In general, we had a lot of positive feedback and all the users were excited about this product. They all expressed that this product should actually exist. We also feel that the experiment had a lot of limitations due to the fact that not all the tasks were experimented thus we were unable to get feedback from the additional features. We feel that there needs to be a lot more testing done before we can finalize the design of Study Buddy. Aside from this, we felt that this experiment was a successful one in that it revealed to us the strengths and weaknesses of Study Buddy. Furthermore, the experiment gave us a lot of positive feedbacks that could help us improve Study Buddy.

[edit] Appendix

Information for participants Objective: To improve the design of Study Buddy through user studies and identify any potential logic flaws in the system

Explanations: We are doing a design project for our IEOR 170 class and we propose to have a device at the entrance of the library that will locate open seats according to the users’ choices.

Procedures of the experiment:

1.Demo: One of us is going to demonstrate how Study Buddy works and we are going to show you how to find a seat in Moffitt Library through Study Buddy.

2.User’s experience: Next, we will ask you to perform one of the three tasks that we have identified from our past studies, and you will use Study Buddy to accomplish it.

3.The experiment is going to be run like the following setting:

Demo Script The task that we choose for demonstration is “find a seat.” First, we will need to swipe our Cal student ID to register our information in Study Buddy. We will select the option “find a seat” by clicking on the corresponding button on the interface screen of Study Buddy.

Figure 1. Main interface of Study Buddy.

This will take the user to the next window for choosing how to find a seat: 1) by floor level; 2) by research interest; 3) any open seat. For the purpose of demonstration, we will choose to find a seat by floor level. So we click on “floor level”. The user will then have the option of choosing to sit in either the Moffitt Library or the Main Stacks.

Figure 2. Options for finding a seat.

For the purpose of demonstration, we choose to be seated in level 4 of Moffitt Library, so we click on the corresponding button.

Figure 3. Choose your seat location by floor.

Next, we are shown a map with all the available seats on 4th floor Moffitt at that specific moment. The green dots on the map represent seats that are available to be reserved. To reserve a seat, we click on a green dot corresponding to the seat that we want to reserve.

Figure 4. Reserve an available seat.

For the next step, we need to specify the subject that we plan to study. We will choose Buddhist Studies for the purpose of demonstration. Notice that the user can also make this information private if desired.

Figure 5. Choosing study subject.

Once the seat is successfully reserved, the user will be prompted to the confirmation interface screen, and he/she can make entrance into the library. In addition, at the end of the seat reservation process, the user will also have the option to reserve another seat starting from the main interface screen (but doing so will delete any prior reservation).

Figure 6. Seat confirmation.

Other interface screens based on the chosen options on Study Buddy:

Figure 7. How to create a study group (steps 1-4)

Figure 8. How to search for a student in the library.

Figure 9. Interface screen showing the student’s location.

Figure 10. Computer availability on 1st floor Moffitt Computer Lab.

Figure 11. List of book disciplines.

Task Instructions for Participants

For the testing procedure, each user will need to achieve the following three tasks (ranked in order of increasing difficulty). Each user will first be asked to perform an easy task, then a moderate task, and finally a hard task using Study Buddy. The tasks that will be given to the users are explained below:

1.	Computer availability (easy): You want to check any available computer on 1st floor Moffitt Library’s computer lab 
2.	Find/create a study group (moderate): You want to study with or meet other people in your class. Specifically, you will use Study Buddy to create a study group for an IEOR course on 4th floor Moffitt Library.
3.	Find a seat close to research interest (hard): You want to locate an available seat close to the books in the subject area on which you plan to do research. Specifically, you will use Study Buddy to locate an available seat close to the social sciences area on 4th floor Moffitt Library.

Pictures from the Experiment

The Test Run Facilitator: Luciana cook Pretending to be a user: Onyi Lam