timeframe:

2 weeks - Fall 2008

team members:

Eugene Chang, Hillary Elmore

design methods:

Persona Creation, Pre-test Questionnaire, Paper Prototyping, Usability Testing, Post-test Questionnaire

full report:

PDF (~4.1 MB)

The goal of this design was to create an interface for the iPod Touch for multiple choice questions. Specifically, the design focused on answering an individual question, getting feedback as to the correctness of the answers selected as well as allowing for the user to see an explaination of the question.

The core of our design rested on making the interface as much like the existing iPod controls as possible. This included colors, list styles, and navigation operations, such as dragging a list to scroll and two finger zoom for pictures. Our user testing showed that this facilitated the adoption of the new interface.

Another major consideration was the design of the answer selection mechanism. Instead of simply highlighting elements that were selected, we chose to use spacial locality to show which answers the user had picked. The selected items would float to the top of the list. These answers would remain at the top of the list even after the user submitted the question. This coupled with the coloring and sizing of the elements after submittion allowed the user to easily see what answers were selected as well as which were correct and incorrect.

A key lesson learned from this project is that pure innovation was not necessarily always the best solution. Many of our peers decided to start from the ground up, taking the touch-screen elements from the existing iPod Touch software, but not taking any of the visual elements. It became apparent us after the fact that this lack of new visual elements was specifically the thing that made our project a success.