suncom : usability study

Participants understood the drag and drop mechanism and used it with little to no problem.

• Many participants got the drag and drop concept from their first impression of viewing the page.
• The clean, simple initial screen with the repetitive dotted boxes that contained clear instructions helped the participants make those connections.
• Even participants that missed the concept at first, used it to recover from missteps, even when the prototype had a defect.
• The ability to understand drag and drop spanned neophyte to expert web users and non- to current wireless customers.

Once they achieved an initial comfort level with the tool, participants easily manipulated the filtering and sorting features to find phones.

• Participants understood most of the tabs and sort options and could anticipate the results of their interaction.
• Bluetooth, represented in a tab, was not understood by the participants.
• Many participants expressed their preference for flip phones.
• Participants expected "brands" to be a filter function rather than a sort, and found it awkward to scroll through the phones to find a specific brand.

However, most participants did not notice the tab or sort menus without prompting or prolonged exposure.

• Participants were visually drawn to the phone gallery first.
• One further explanation is that since the tabs were in the same physical position of the main navigation menu, that participants ignored it while "on task" viewing the phones.
• Many participants did not notice when the phone gallery updated during interaction with the filter or sort menus.

Although loved by enthusiasts, the Choose Phone by Features menu was considered “not worth the trouble” by the neophyte web users.

• Like the tab groups and the sort menu, the “Choose Phone by Features” menu was not typically noticed without prompting.
• Many participants did not notice that the phone gallery updated as they were manipulated the menu. As the top most selection (speaker phone) is ubiquitous phone feature, its selection did not help the user understand the function.
• Some participants were confused with the relationship between the features menu and the tab groups, specifically when entries were shared.
• Based on its label ("Features"), participants did not expect to able to search for brands in this menu.