Experience with Paper Prototyping

Overall, the paper prototype of NearMe that Team Hermes produced was a success - the prototype was (according to the testers) clear and easy to understand - and this was essentially proven by the large amount of feedback we received.

The paper prototype is shown below:

After letting the testers play around with the prototype, we asked them 3 questions:

1. What did you think of the general interface?

The general consensus was that there should be a page leading to the map to allow users to have a bit more clarity in understanding what was going on. Furthermore, a large amount of users insisted that we add a help button to ensure that even if the user had no idea what was going on, there was a source of information that would help them.

2. What are your thoughts on the concept of NearMe? Can it be refined in anyway?

While the majority of testers agreed that the concept was interesting, a very small fraction of people suggested that we try and make the results that appear vary in size, in accordance to how important they were. However, this would essentially be impossible as Trove had no way of outlining events let alone their importance.

3. Can you think of any potential bugs that we may have to deal with?

There were two main answers to this question - the first answer was that Trove was an international database - as we had no way of restricting the results to Australia, Trove would be grabbing results from across the globe. A secondary problem that was pointed out was that we had no way of removing results that weren't 'events' because, as mentioned previously, Trove does not outline events in any way.

Overall, the results gathered from this prototyping session went a long way in helping Team Hermes refine NearMe and will prove to be a a major step in removing issues that will hinder the user experience.