Usability testing occurred during the one-week span of March 9-16. We divided our testing into two rounds, the first round on March 9 and the second round on March 16. After the first round testing, we optimized our prototype according to participants’ suggestions, then held the second round testing one week after. Ten participants were recruited who had never heard of our project before but yet had a need to look for roommates, or had related roommate-finding experiences. During the half-an-hour testing sessions, each participant was asked to do the task of searching for suitable roommates on Roomster. Time spent on the task and qualitative comments were collected for each participant. Each session was recorded …show more content…
While the primary users of Roomster are students from California, as most of them cannot apply for the university dormitories, it also prefer to target graduates who determine to work in California but lack roommates to share an apartment, as well as local students who prefer to live separately from parents.
Goal of Usability Testing
Goal for the usability testing was to collect both quantitative and qualitative data of new users learning how to use Roomster to search for potential roommates for the first time. We hope that the results of the usability testing can be used by us to understand the strengths and weaknesses of this project and serve as a benchmark for future usability testing.
Participant’s selection
Since our goal was to find the strengths and weaknesses of this project, we recruited users who had never heard Roomster before but had a need to look for roommates, or had related roommate-finding experiences. They should be future students, present students or graduates of a certain university in California. We recruited our participants through our social networks, and offered them a small gift as an incentive for …show more content…
“I find the table very stressful and the classification of information is not clear.” Solution is to change table to listed information, add more sections in user’s own information.
Three person points out that “The advanced search is confusing”, “I do not understand the relationship between apartment and roommate.” Solution is to change boxes to listed options to make it easier to understand, and also add missed buttons. Four users mentioned that more personal information such as lifestyle is necessary. “I hope to see more personalized information to know what kind of person the potential roommate is.” Solution is to provide choices related to lifestyle and apartment requirements.
Three person points out that the whole process of registration and search is not very smooth, some buttons are missing. “I think there should be a next or finish button.” “I can’t go back to the homepage.” Adding navigation at the top of each page, and change “submit” to “finish” can solve the