Thesis Project 09: Testing (1)

1-hour testing with my classmate as a start of the testing phase. I will try to test with target users I don’t know next time.

4 min readDec 4, 2020

There are two parts of this testing:

A comparative testing of three ideas to validate the big ideas.
A usability testing of the wireframe prototype of idea 2 — synchronous online gigs, to validate the user flow.

Full-time graduate student, in New York City, 25

The user does think the asynchronous gig(idea 1) can bring her an exciting simulative co-play gig vibe for herself. And the process is much simpler and less-hassle because this idea doesn’t need necessary player-player interaction, e.g. dialogs. The community interaction model of this idea tends to be a “subscription” or a “follow” model, not an instant messaging model.
The user concerns the synchronous gig(idea 2) needs more direct user participation and a successful synchronous co-play gig experience totally depends on the effectiveness of the player-player interaction. But she believes this idea can bring her more interesting and joyful interactions with her current friends or help make more new friends than idea 1.
Idea 3 is more like a local version that can be combined with idea 2.

Idea 1 and idea 2 both provided meaningful interaction models that facilitate the co-play process.
There are conflicts between low-complexity, and rich player-to-player interaction and rich gig vibes. More complexity can lead to less participation. I think for idea 2, I need to make some full-experience use case demos to test if the complexity level is acceptable.
I am surprised that she gave much better feedback on idea 1 than I expected. Should I combine these two ideas?

User Response: The user noticed she has two ways to add users to her group. One way is to send a request of new users with or without a specific instrument skill and/or level to the public pool, the other way is to invite her current friends.
User Feedback: She wants to get more user recommendations here like the content on the Discover Musician page. “Open Matching” filters are too broad now.

User Response: The user noticed she needs to go to the “My Gig” page and press the “chat” button to enter the chat room to see the messages.
User Feedback: She thinks the flow is too complex. She wants a new message notification page that shows all unread messages at a higher level because if she is practicing with her co-players, there must be a lot of messages within the group. The current flow is very inconvenient.

User Response: The user doesn’t understand what is “Schedule” under “Her Gigs”, which is the place showing what gigs this user is participating in so that more people can subscribe and see this user’s live co-play gigs on time. (by the way, here shouldn’t have the word indicating a user’s gender).
User Feedback: Don’t know what is “Schedule”. And she wants to see this user’s posts about the recordings of past gigs first to decide whether she wants to follow this user. If she is not interested in this person, she also doesn’t care about what gigs this user is participating in.

User Response: The user can understand she can select two different devices — one is for displaying the musical score and the other is for streaming.
User Feedback: Although She wants to watch other people’s gigs on her iPhone, she prefers to only use either iPad or Macbook when playing the musical instrument.