Design Question

One question I have is about using our widgets.  The descriptions are somewhat vague which could cause problems for users who are not very familiar with navigating sites.  The question I have is if the widgets and their descriptions are specific enough to get the task we are asking of them, try to find recommended albums,  done.

My hope and expectation is that the tests our group will be performing with the prototypes will answer this question.  I am sure every group member will ask a variety of different kinds of users.  This variety should show whether this concern is really going to be a problem for the majority of just a minority of users.

The test protocols I would use to figure this out would probably be interviewing.  This way we could ask the users specific questions to get the specific answers we need.  Also, maybe see how long it takes users to navigate the site and complete their assigned task.  This might help us figure out if users who understand or at least say they understand can really navigate on their own effectively.

Design Question

As stated in other blog posts, it is unknowable whether or not people will want to engage with a customizable Amazon or if they prefer to buy things for stagnant webpage and save the customiazation for other things like news, weather, and other things on their homepage or whatever they use (if anything).   It would be  really interesting to see how people react to a more interactive Amazon site.

I think the ideal question to find the answer to is how much ability to customize can you preview to users without them feeling overwhelmed, ruining their browsing experience (like a pushy salesman at bestbuy), but still presenting the new features as available.  As with most online social experiences the ability to “lurk” is very attractive to some people, so that should be kept in mind.

Question about Usability

I was wondering whether what we are doing is going to be beneficial to Amazon Users? We might crate thousands of different prototypes and throw it out there but it might just not appeal to the user. Are people actually going to sit down and play around with the widgets at Amazon.com? Or for that matter will people actually sit down and create a customized web page for themselves at Amazon.com? There are many similar questions like these that i have in mind however they all boil down to one concept and that is; whether the usability of Amazon.com is good enough or do we need to do more to get more users to use the website and enjoy visiting the website?

I think a small survey can answer almost all the questions. We need to find users who intensively use Amazon.com to purchase music and other general products and ask them what they like or dislike about the usability aspect of Amazon.com. Once thats been answered we can explain what we are planning to do and based on our explanation we need to see peoples reaction. Are people interested in what we are saying? Do they like our idea? Do people actually want to spend hours on Amazon.com? Do they just want Amazon to be a website that sells products of do they want more from it?  Once all this has been answered we would know whether what we are doing will actually help users or not

Design Questions

The first question I have about our design is, are people really going to be interested in these sort of things when they come to amazon, or will the majority of people continue to use the site the same way as before? Basically I wonder how many people would actually use the widgets, and if there is an actual interest for them.I also wonder if people really want amazon to have a built in music player. would they prefer to just download the song from amazon and then import it to itunes,winamp, or whatever they use. The amazon player would have to be pretty nice to convince someone to switch from what they currently use to play music.

Design Question

I am very concerned users will not find a customizable homepage useful to them.  Since there are already so many pages out there that they might be able to find the same information elsewhere.  Also, I am worried users will not want to create a new account somewhere and make a new homepage, after making a homepage somewhere else like iGoogle.  So, during my paper prototype test I asked the person a few questions relating to customizable homepage.  For example, I asked them if they already had an account elsewhere, like iGoogle, and if they would be willing to create a new page.  I also asked them if our options were acceptable and easy to use, while they were creating their own homepage on the piece of paper.  I only ended up testing this out on one person so my findings are not scientific. However, my user was willing to try a new homepage on amazon.com and actually hadn’t set up any other homepages on iGoogle or anything else.

I was also worried that making things more complicated for the user would ruin their experience.  For example, one reason Google is so successful is because of its simplicity to use and it doesn’t clutter a bunch of information on one page.  Hopefully, having a customizable homepage on amazon does not ruin users experiences, which made amazon so successful in the first place.

Concern about our Conceptual Design

Looking at our design approach rises one major concern – Will users stray away from Amazon because of to much confusion?  The purpose of Amazon is an easy, flexible and very quick e-commerce site that people use to solely purchase goods and be recommended items that they may like to also then purchase.  Our implication of the personalized widgets/applications may make the e-commerce site to much of a social site and restrict Amazon’s customer scope.  Think about it, Facebook and MySpace, though both are very popular, still do not have every single internet user jumping on the band wagon.  So those individuals such as grandparents or even most parents that do not enjoy sociability websites and make up the majority of Amazon purchases may not like or new conceptual designs.

One way that we could address this important issue is by prompting an Amazon purchaser if they would enjoy the freedom to customize a homepage.  After a purchase made on Amazon we could send the purchaser an email of what we could offer them in the form of our widgets and see if they wold enjoy this customization.  We could ask them which they like the most and which they would actually use.

Question About the Project

Do users really want more from Amazon (A page they can customize to their liking), or do they just want to go there to shop and nothing else? How much do the users want to be involved with Amazon? Our group agreed that none of us liked how the main page was set up. There is way too many advertisements and nothing that can directly appeal to most buyers. But, if we put in a widgets page, we do not know if the user will use them or just go to Amazon buy their music and leave. If Amazon did put in the widgets I do not see them taking off right away. It might be one of those things that may get more popular over time. I do think though that it is a neat concept to turn a website that is strictly about purchases into a website where users can socialize with one another.

One way we could go about answering this question is take a group of people who have amazon accounts and asking them if they are happy with the way Amazon is set up now and what could Amazon possibly change to make it more directed toward their own interests. We could also ask them how important it is to  to be able to converse with other users with similar interests.

Question about Concept

Our group decided to create a prototype of customized page where user can choose widgets. However, my main question is whether the user will use these widgets or not. Also, I would like to know what widgets would be the most popular and if user fully understands the purpose of the widgets first time seeing it. Our prototype of customized amazon web page will definitely help us to understand that. By observing participants in our study we can determine which particular widgets are widely used and if users understand their intended purpose, even though our sample is not going to be representative enough.
Also, another question I have is whether the regional forum feature will be used actively by users. I remember the presentation of another group that chose youtube as their project. They mentioned that comment features on youtube are not widely used, however, youtube developers dedicate most of their time on improvement of youtube comment feature. I understand this is design project and we’ll have numerous prototypes before finding the right one, but on the other hand I don’t want us to spend most of our time on the widget that will be useless. In order to get the answer to this question our group will simply observe how users interact with forum widget. Afterwards, we could ask participants why they chose or didn’t choose this widget. We could also apply the same technique to every single widget. In addition, we could interview users informally about their overall feelings and perceptions about different aspects of our prototype.

Prototype Hopes

The question that I want to be answered in the paper prototyping observations is:  “Is increased sociability something that users are looking for in online shopping?” The way that our prototype could help to answer this question is that in our prototype we are asking users to create a custome Amazon.com homepage similar to iGoogle. Within this we have a list of widget options to add to the homepage. One of the widget options is a regional forum that would allow users to communicate in a text chat forum with other users that live in the same region of the world (similar to facebook networks). Our primary observation research told us that in brick and mortar stores, social interaction provided a lot of utility to the average shopper. We want to see if this social appeal could add utility to online shopping as it does in store. So, by seeing if users are interested in an application that lets them communicate with other people while shopping, we will get an idea of how important social interaction is to that shopper.

One of the challenges that we will need to overcome however is preventing users from skipping over the forum app because they dont like the layout of the forum widget. We are trying to overcome this barrier by making our design as generic as we can, and also as Kevin mentioned to us, by creating multiple layout options for each of our widgets. So, hopefully by seeing how many of our participants choose the forum widget we will be able to tell if users are interested in a social interaction feature in an online shopping environment.

Concept Generation

I’m getting caught up on all the blogging the past week or so. I commented on a few individual blogs, but mostly I’ll speak to the group as a whole here.

The past two weeks asked you to do the same basic thing in two different ways. For the first week, you were asked to leverage the user needs and requirements document (the outcome of what you have learned about your user group) and think of a concept that would come from that document. This past week, you were asked to convert your work into PRInCiPleS components and then randomly extract a few predispositions, research and insights to help you brainstorm new ideas. We weren’t asking for the implementation components (prototypes and strategies); just new concepts.

The concept generation from the needs & requirements document—and some of the comments you made (please do more of that)—ended up with a nice swath of somewhat overlapping ideas. I loved some of the simple ideas, like adding chat or background music, because they could be fun to prototype and evaluate.

The Pukinskis Sets, on the other hand, didn’t seem to generate many radically new ideas. Many of the components were probably too closely related to each other to allow that kind of new discovering, and in the end they largely seemed to be another way of presenting the same ideas you had just talked about. Particularly the later posts were too similar in the selection of components, which is an indication that (a) you guys were lazy in the selection, (b) the selection of components wasn’t coordinated, or (c) you don’t have enough components from which to choose. (There were some nice exceptions, of course, that are likely to make your conversations and work this week even richer.) HOWEVER, the other big learn to be had here is the construction of an argument, and across the board your use of selected components to make an argument for your concepts were very effective.

I don’t think the formalism is going to appeal to everyone, but ultimately it can help you formulate your power point presentation very nicely. Every slide is essentially a component or set of related components, so it is good to get in the practice of boiling down longer descriptions to a simple sentence or phrase. Naming things is very important to help your brain make better sense of your own work, as well as facilitating communication to others. Give your components names (in fact, it would be a good idea to review your own Pukinskis Sets and give them each a name for the group of components you constructed).

This week, you are likely going to be asked to make your decision about which concept(s) to turn into a prototype to evaluate. When making this decision, consider which make the strongest arguments, perhaps with an eye toward the strategies (technical, business and social) that will likely be a part of your final presentation.