VB Prototype 3

Screenshots | Explanation

Screenshots

MetroViz: Start Screen

 

MetroViz: Multiple Divisions Selected, Bar Graph

 

MetroViz: One Metric Selected, Line Graph

 

Explanation

MetroViz Updates

After the first round of man-on-the-street user testing, we made some changes to the interface. We saw that many people had problems with selecting years and divisions and saw that some of that confusion came from the options being hidden in a menu. We changed the format from drop-down menu to radio buttons to increase visibility. We also added error messages to assist our users when they attempted to graph something that has no data or that MetroViz does not support.

Heuristic Evaluation

Before doing another round of user testing, we decided to step back and do a heuristic evaluation of MetroViz. We wanted to find any glaring problems and bugs as well as mental-model mismatches. We hoped to streamline our interface and fix any problems before our next round of user testing.

High-Level Findings

The heuristic evaluation was conducted by two team members. They combed over the interface, noting both problems and good aspects. A big theme seemed to be lack of clear labeling. For example, the "Graph Elements" label is vague and does not match what functionality it contains, which is comparison methods such as by year or by divisions. Changing the label to "Compare by" to better fit the user's mental model of how to use it may be a better solution.

We also found various bugs, such as a system crashes when certain keywords are searched. In the time axis, the system also lacked checks to see if end date is later than the start date. This violated the heuristic of "error prevention". We planned to make these fixes with our next iteration.

Some of the problems we found in the interface were due to features that weren't yet implemented, such as lack of help, save and export to Excel. We planned on implementing these features for our final prototype.

In addition to problems with our interface, we also found good aspects that we wanted to be sure to keep in our final interface. These included the ability to search metrics and feedback for metrics selected and errors.

See Heuristic Evaluation II for more details on our testing results.

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