User Test 1

For the user testing I did on the 23th of February, I asked one person at a time to fill out a questionnaire of four questions after giving a brief description of what our app is. The description was "Pickaxe is an app used for stumbling upon hidden gems in a city". They then filled out the questionnaire and I clarified anything in the questionnaire they were unsure of.

The questions were:

1.       List several features you think would be in this app.

2.       List those features in order of importance.

3.       When you arrive in a city, what kind of things would you like to see/do?

4.       If you had to make an account, would you prefer to log in through Facebook or make a new account?

 After I had gathered all of the completed questionnaires from the ten subjects, I put all of the data into a spreadsheet and grouped similar answers together to see what percentage of testers want a particular feature.

The experiment took place in a familiar environment to the users, as it was a lab in CIT that they knew well. The users were multimedia students who would be familiar with app development as we wanted to see what kind of features they thought could appear in the app. I kept a record of those who took part in the user testing and what their corresponding letter in the spreadsheet, though their identities will not be displayed.  

From the results, a majority of the users suggested features we were thinking about implementing and we also got one or two ideas that we had not considered such as a "gem of the day" or displaying the best times to visit certain places.

The results reinforced several ideas we had and gave us several more options that we may explore further. I do feel that only ten people is a small number to try and get accurate readings, so I may have more users answer the questionnaire to gather as much information as possible. If I do test more users, I may try and get people who are not familiar with app development to see what the everyday user looks for in an app like Pickaxe.

We asked Question 3 to try and determine what kinds of activities users would be interested in so that we can develop set categories from the most recurring answers. Question 4 may not seem that relevant to the rest of the questionnaire, though we included it to get a general idea of people's preferences. We did this so our coder didn't waste time looking up how to do something that wouldn't be implemented later on.