Think aloud with a friend

Today I met a friend of mine, Maja, whom i asked to try our simple iPhone version of our idea. She's a woman in her late twenties and a mother of two small children.

The first thing I told her is that this is an application used for quickly finding a desired route for a suggested museum. I told her that the purpose of this application is to make it easier to choose museums and that it reduces the amount of problems on the side such as, apart from finding a desired museum, checking for transport routes and other conveniences.

I sat beside her, asking her to focus solely on the application alone, and to speak her mind whilst navigating it.

1. The first thing she mentioned was that that she didn't quite understand all the icons. She suggested that we combine some icons into more general ones. For example; why was there an icon of a coffee cup as well as an apple?

Furthermore, she suggested that there should be some kind of 'help' box providing information for how to use the application. She asked if these museums were restricted to one specific city (Stockholm in this case), and whether the user may change it to other cities.

2. After choosing a desired icon she proceeded to the page with convenciences. She approved of the idea that one has the opportunity to choose conveniences such as ATM machines or wheel chair support. However, she didn't quite understand the "Estimated time" slider; since it had no display text, it was hard to determine in what scale the slider was measured in.

3. Ending up in the page with the suggested museums, she told us that it would be nice to see where the museums were located, with some more displayed text beneath each suggested museum's title.

She did like the concept and considered it relevant to our work, and that an application like this might help people like herself, with children, to make it easier to visit museums.