Further design treatments

Work on new logos, icon designs, and refining the interface

User Testing 11

For the user testing I conducted on the 13th of May, I narrowed down the remaining designs and had people rank them in order of preference. I showed them the 5 most popular designs and they looked through them and then ranked them 1-5, with one being the favourite and five being the least favourite.

While no one of them received all positive or negative marks there were a few that people like a lot. Like with my previous ranking test, I added up the marks given to each design and checked which had the lowest mark out of all of them to determine the most well received one. I would've preferred to have had more than ten people test it just to try and get as large a group as possible to get the most accurate results for this test. The one that was most popular was one from the "All Mine" colour scheme, it was mainly a red and cream design while the least popular design was from the "Coal Mine" colour scheme which had more darker colours to it, like black and grey.

User Testing 10

For the user testing I conducted on the 10th of May, I continued on with colour schemes and their distribution. I had people take a look at several versions of each of the three colour schemes distributed differently to see what people's reactions were and what they thought could work, didn't work or could be changed to improve it.

A lot of people hated the brighter colours being used prominently and thought that they would work better when used sparingly like the blue colours in the scheme "All Mine" or the greys in "Diamond Mine". The majority also seemed to like the ones with a white background or an off white background (the creams and the light greys) more than the coloured backgrounds (like the greens, blacks and blues). Our next step will be to narrow down the preferred designs and have people rank the remaining designs to try and finalize our design.

Here are some examples of what I tested:

User Test 9

For the user testing I conducted on the 9th of May, I expanded on the previous test of people's opinions of the colour schemes. My group and I reviewed the remarks made on each of the colour schemes and took out the ones that received the most negativity. I then showed a list of them to a series of users and had them rank them from favourite to least favourite to further narrow them down. We added up the numbers that each person assigned them, with one being favourite and nine being least favourite. With the numbers added up we reviewed their total value, with the lower the value the more popular it was and vice versa. We narrowed them down to the three most popular colours to test further. Our next step for this will be to distribute each schemes colours in a basic layout to see what people think of some of the colour distribution of those colour schemes.

User Test 8

For the user testing I conducted on the 4th of May, I had people test the app's basic functionality. I recorded them going through the app and asked them if they found anything not that intuitive or confusing and made note of it. Some of the users didn't grasp the terminology right away but they understood it as they used it or when I explained it to them after they asked what it meant. Some problems I encountered were the browser not picking up my location meaning that the users were unable to use the map at all. But they grasped how the app works and what each tab and button was for.

User Test 7

For the user testing I conducted on the 2nd of May, I had five people look at various colour schemes and some logo designs and get their opinions on them one at a time. I showed them each of the colour schemes one at a time and took down their thoughts on them. We got a similar response on several of the colour schemes, such as a green looking quite militaristic or like camouflage. Another consensus was that some of the ones with a splash of a bright colour with darker ones were well received. Most of the users didn't care for the predominantly darker schemes. Some of the results varied a bit but for the most part people liked and disliked the same colour schemes. After I had showed them all of the colour schemes I showed them several logo designs we had for Pickaxe. The most well received was version three of the logo, while most people seemed to dislike version five.

New logo and colour scheme treatments

Rough of logo for app icon purposes, plus colour scheme roughs with the new logo added in. Still some tweaks to be made, and testing to be done before finalising the design, but I think it's getting there. Next step: creating some stylesheets and organising the assets for the working version of the app prototype.