Kenneth Runnman Think Aloud

When you gather data you have to first consider the five key issues. So before I was doing the session I had to set goal for what I wanted to accomplish with the session. My goal with the session was to get answers to the questions.

The Questions:

• How can we make the app more user friendly? I want to see if there is any misunderstanding that can be solved with icons and if it is easy for the user navigate through the app.
• Find out if the user is missing any functions in the app that could be useful?

Identifying the participant: I did a think aloud protocol session with my cousins wife. She has only been in the country and the city for about three months and she has a kid so I thought that she would be a great subject considering that she fit both of our target groups: parents to children and tourists.

Relationship with the participant: I began with explaining what we were going to do and how I was going to use the information that was gathered during the session. She is from the Philippines and her english is limited so I asked her husband to be present so that he could translate when she couldn’t communicate properly in english. Then I explained how our prototype works and the purpose it has.

The five key issues also includes triangulation and pilot studies. The meaning of triangulation is that the investigation should be viewed from more than one perspective, and I think that we do that as a group because everyone is doing their own think aloud session. I am a little bit uncertain about the pilot study because we are doing only one think aloud session per person in the group. But we did one collective think aloud session before we did an individual session.

So I continued with the statement “Imagine that you are looking for a museum in Stockholm and you are using this app to find a suitable museum”. I took notes with the use of pen and paper because I think that the subject was more comfortable with that rather than a audio or video recording. As the session started I kept quiet and took notes, only to open my mouth when she was quiet for a longer moment. When that happened I asked her what she was thinking about.

The conclusions from the session were that the icons was hard to understand because there were many similar icons that could be the same thing on the first page. The icons was better on the second page but that there can be improvements to those icons too. It wasn’t very clear what “estimated time”  means, if it is estimated time in the museum or travel time to the museum. She also didn’t like the background that the app had, she didn’t think that it was neat. On the third page she thought that it would be great if you could see a star rating and feedback from other users to make it easier for her to decide. She thought that the fourth page could use a little more information about the museum and its exhibition as it can be a temporary exhibitions that would be interesting.

Kenneth Runnman