!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!Team 11: Funky Monkeys

“My Secret Friend” an Electronic Diary System !

Group Members:!Rafaat Mir!

Alara Ozturk!Razana Tariq Dallas LeclercGoomin Kwan !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!Table of Contents!!Section A: Horizontal Prototype and Re-design Rationale! ! ! ! 3 ! A.1 Redesign Rationale ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 3!! !! A.2 Additional Analysis and Evaluation! ! ! ! ! ! 4!! ! ! ! !! A.3 Prototype Illustrations! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 5!!Section B: User Evaluation Plan! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 8!! B.1 User Evaluation Protocol! ! ! ! ! ! ! 8!!Section C: Analysis of User Evaluations! ! ! ! ! ! ! 10 ! C.1 Study Subjects! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 10!!! C.2 Evaluation Results! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 11 ! C.3 Final Design Rationale and Discussion of the State of Design! ! 13 ! C.4 Reflection on Design Process!! ! ! ! ! ! 14!Section D: Resource Management! ! ! ! ! ! ! 15 ! Appendix A - Low Fidelity Prototype of “My Secret Friend”! ! ! ! 16!!Appendix B - User Prototype Feedback Survey!! ! ! ! ! 18!!Appendix C - “My Secret Friend” User Evaluation Questionnaire! ! ! 19!!Appendix D - Statistical Analysis of Controlled User Study Data! ! ! 21!!Appendix E - User Study Consent Forms! ! ! ! ! ! 22!!!!!!!!!!!!

Section A: Horizontal Prototype and Re-design Rationale A.1 Redesign Rationale!!Previously, in Pass 1 of the Memory Universe, we developed a low fidelity prototype of our system and performed a task walkthrough with it. We had students, who are the expected users of our system, evaluate our low fidelity prototype and had another team of five members perform a heuristic evaluation on it. From the task walkthrough, we learned that certain tasks were consuming too much time and may as a result have been deterring to users. For instance, creating an environment to store information in required six or seven steps and this made the task somewhat arduous. From the user evaluation, we learned that our model of the Memory Universe was not the most obvious to start. From the heuristic evaluation we learned that the steps required to do certain tasks such as deleting objects were not immediately obvious to the user. From the entire process of creating the low fidelity prototype of our Memory Universe and obtaining feedback from a variety of different people we in fact, realized that the mental model of our system was not clear. We also realized that given the constraint of time, creating the system we were hoping to make was probably not feasible. So after taking into account all the feedback we received from many different people, we decided to change our direction completely and design a system that may be more manageable. The system we chose to design is an electronic diary with the hope that a design involving this will be more doable and the functionality more obvious.!!Our new design is called “My secret friend”, and it is an electronic diary protected by a password. The application allows user to store written memories, photos and videos in a protected environment and provides privacy for the content. The main reason for choosing the electronic diary was the familiarity of the “diary” idea. Before deciding on our new application we evaluated the design idea amongst our group. We have considered how the diaries are used, the current problems of using a regular diary and how we could fix the current issues with our application. One of the biggest issues of using a regular diary is the confidentiality issue where they usually come with a small locket or a lock mounted to the cover of the diary. Physical locks could be easily broken by an intruder where on the other hand password protection is more reliable and commonly used for protection. Another problem in using a regular diary is storing photos where user needs a hard copy of the photos and need to stick them on pages. Through our application, users have the ability to store not only photos but also videos of their memorable moments.!!There are various applications existing today similar to our design such as; my wonderful days, my diary, diary pro etc. where users can login to their diaries through their phones using a password. Before adding functionality to our application we have tested the existing applications to have a better understanding the missing functionalities and how we can fulfill the needs of the users. As a result we have decided to make our application multimedia friendly where photos and videos can be stored along with the written notes and memos.!!

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So, with the idea of a new system in mind and a problem the new system should seek to solve we went on to identify the goals and constraints of the system. As our main goal, we aimed to create an electronic diary system which users could utilize to store both text and digital multimedia. We set the target market to focus on an audience of young adults primarily from the ages of 19 to 25, while hoping to set no real limitations for anyone who would wish to use our system. As most users within this age category are expected to own their own laptops or personal computers, we decided to create our electronic diary system in the form of a Windows application. !!A.2 Additional Analysis and Evaluation!!So, to help develop the electronic diary “My Secret Friend”, one of the design team members who kept a diary in the past helped list the features that they would like to see in the application. We also assigned this person to play a lead role in developing the low fidelity prototype of “My Secret Friend”, focussing on keeping the main features easy to use and easy to find. A low fidelity prototype was created and informally evaluated by users to obtain feedback. Pictures of the low fidelity prototype are included in Appendix A - Low Fidelity Prototype of “My Secret Friend”. A.3 Prototype Illustrations!With a low-fidelity prototype in place and some feedback from informal user evaluations we went ahead and refined our low fidelity prototype. After refining the model and laying out the features we would like to see in the medium fidelity prototype, we went ahead and developed the prototype with preference for a design including only necessary features. The prototype supports all the main functionalities allowing users to add, delete, and browse through entries. The screenshots starting below display the different screens in our prototype: !Figure 1: Login Screen of “My Secret Friend”

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!!Figure 2: Home Screen of “My Secret Friend”

!So from figure 2 above, one can see that we aimed for a minimalistic design. We eliminated a lot of features we initially proposed in our low-fidelity prototype and earlier versions of the medium-fidelity prototype after representative users of our application made us critically question the importance of every feature. In the end, We just decided to focus on the diary experience that most users are familiar with by eliminating any unnecessary features. !!!!!!!!!!!!

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Figure 3: Creating an Entry using My Secret Friend

Again, we changed the design of the individual pages of our diary from a previous plainer version after users indicated that they liked this design better. The Eiffel Tower to the side of the pages might make our design look better but we recognize that it does not add value to the diary. User evaluation based on whether users would like to keep or remove the Eiffel Tower would help us decide its fate but so far when asked about it, users appeared to like it. !

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Figure 4: Browsing Entries Using My Secret Friend!

!A video was embedded in the above entry and we thought this was an interesting feature which most other diaries did not offer. In the context of trying to provide users with a traditional diary look and feel in a digital environment, the ability to add multimedia to the journal helped merge an old style with an emerging one. Further user evaluations would be required to assess the efficacy of being able to add videos to diary entries. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Section B: User Evaluation PlanB.1 Evaluation Protocol!This section outlines the evaluation protocol we designed to help us perform both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of our system through a user study. In order to provide users with a standard to measure our application against, we used “myDiary” the most popular Windows diary application on “softonic.com”.!!Representative Users!Our target audience is young adults aged from 19 to 25 so we plan to include in our study young adults from as diverse an age range possible within 19 to 25. We believe we should include more females than males in our study in order to accurately represent expected users since more women keep diaries than men. Furthermore, we would require that our study users have had kept a diary in the past so they know how to write diary entries. This is an important criteria as well, since we expect most of the users of our system to be people who have previously kept a diary. Evaluation Plan !First, we plan on emailing a representative user with our “My Secret Friend” application and our competitor’s “myDiary” application along some instructions. Through the instructions we would ask half the users to use “My Secret Friend” first to write and save an entry containing roughly 100 words or less during the night and the other half to use “myDiary” first. We would then ask these users to select the second diary and write an entry on it the next night in roughly 100 words or less. Once two days had passed, we would ask the users to count the number of words they wrote in each diary and report it to us. We would inform the users that it would be fine even if they exceeded the word count on their entries and that the exact word count would be important to perform a proper evaluation. This would be done to discourage users from reporting lower numbers than they actually wrote for their entries. If we noticed any outliers from this procedure, we would avoid including their data during the data analysis phase. !At this point, users would also be sent a link to a user evaluation questionnaire to complete based on their experience writing to each diary. The questionnaire would be more focussed on obtaining user feedback on their thoughts of “My Secret Friend” and a copy of it appears in Appendix C - “My Secret Friend” User Evaluation Questionnaire.!Details about the parameters of a controlled study appears below: !!Hypothesis!The appealing design and traditional diary look of our interface will encourage users to write more in our diary than in myDiary, a popular competitor diary. !!Null HypothesisThe design of our diary does not encourage users to write more than myDiary does. !!

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We hope to prove our hypothesis by rejecting the null hypothesis. !!Test Subjects:!The representative users mentioned above cover our test subjects!!Subject pool size:!10 users!!Variables!-independent:!! - the design appeal of our diary and our competitor’s diary!! - the mechanism used to create entries in a diary!!-dependent:!! - Number of words users write for their entries in our diary versus our ! !! competitor’s diary. !! - The amount of time it takes users to figure out how to and create a diary entry !! - How personal the experience of writing to a diary felt. !!-“nuisance”:!! - results may be affected by which diary the user writes an entry to first.!! - results may be affected by time of day in which user writes to diary.!! - results may be affected by the individuality of the user who writes entries to !! diaries.!! - results may be affected by the locality from which we obtain users.!!The first nuisance variable was mitigated by asking half the users to write to “My Secret Friend” first and the other half to “myDiary” first. The second nuisance variable was mitigated by asking users to write entries during the night before they went to sleep. The third nuisance variable was mitigated by trying to obtain as many users for the study as feasible given the time constraint. The fourth nuisance variable was mitigated by aiming to study users from different ethnic backgrounds. Given more time and means, we would also include users from different countries in our study.!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Section C: Analysis of User Evaluations!!C1. Study Subjects !!Our primary target audience is young adults aged from 19 to 25 so for our test users we tried to represent the demographic as well as possible. We emailed family and friends to obtain nine users who were females within the age of 19 to 25 and user who is a guy from this age range. The reason we aimed for a 9 girls to 1 guy ratio is because most diary users are female and we believed the ratio to be realistically representative of our actual users after some online research. Our study users covered people from varying nationalities and our youngest user was 20 years old while our oldest was 25. All our users stay within Vancouver and nine of them are students at UBC. !All of the users included in our study did plan on keeping a diary in the future and had kept a diary in the past. Users who kept a diary in the past was desirable since they would know how to add entries to a diary and what to expect from a diary application. Previous diary keepers would have expectations of what diaries are supposed to do and could inform us of shortcomings with “My Secret Friend”. Furthermore, all our users were technologically savvy and knew how to use computers and applications well. This was desirable as most expected users of “My Secret Friend” would likely be acquainted well enough with technology to want to use an electronic diary. When we performed an informal user evaluation with the low fidelity prototype of our application we used a different user group. We figured this to be desirable since, the users could not carry any biases towards the design from exposure to a lower level prototype before starting the controlled study. We also did not inform users beforehand that the diary application they were going to test out was created by us to prevent them from rating our application well because they know members from our team. !! ! ! ! ! ! !! ! ! !! ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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C2 Evaluation Results !!The main purpose of our evaluation was to determine whether the clean design and traditional diary resemblance of “My Secret Friend” encouraged users to write more than myDiary which used a different approach to the interface. We hoped that we could prove that users would write more words for their entries when using “My Secret Friend” and this would indicate that the design is superior. To get the number of words written, we had ten users write two entries over the span of two days and then report their word count for each diary. The number of words written by each user in each diary is tabulated in the raw data section of our appendix and is visualized in the following graph: !!Graph 1: Number of words written for entries in “myDiary” and “My Secret Friend”!

!We can see from graph 1 above that the number of words written by users into the two diaries had quite a bit of variation but it does not appear as if users wrote significantly more words when using “My Secret Friend”. We performed statistical analysis on the data using a t-test and we found that the results did not disprove the null hypothesis. Thus, the quantitative result of the study was inconclusive in the sense that it failed to prove that the appealing design and traditional diary resemblance of “My Secret Friend” encouraged users to write more words for their entries than that of myDiary. The statistical analysis that led us to this conclusion appears in Appendix D - Statistical Analysis of Controlled User Study Data. We suspect that the quantitative study ended up being inconclusive because the “number of words” metric in hindsight, was too

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Wor

d C

ount

0

70

140

210

280

Diary ApplicationmyDiary My Secret Friend

inconsistent. Certain users could have ended up writing more words to an entry in one diary simply because they might have experienced more events that day or because they had more time in hand to dedicate towards an entry. When designing the experiment, we had considered these variables as potential factors but we had hoped that the skewing of data by such factors would be random and overcome by users writing significantly more words to either diary.!!The study, nonetheless, did provide some valuable insights with regards to our design. First, we noticed from a closer look at the statistical analysis from the quantitative data that the mean of the number of words written to entries in both “My Secret Friend” and “myDiary” were roughly around the same. This implied that the design of our diary at least did not deter users from writing as much as they would have into an entry from the most popular competitor diary application we could find. !!The quantitative section of the study itself did not prove our hypothesis or validate our design but the qualitative section of the study did helped us in this regard. The qualitative analysis of our data indicated that nine of the ten users involved in the study indicated that if they had to create an entry using either myDiary or “My Secret Friend”, they would use “My Secret Friend”. Users also indicated that they enjoyed browsing through entries more in “My Secret Friend” and that they found the diary to be ‘secure’ and ‘attractive’.!!Limitations of the study included that we chose to measure a metric which was difficult to control and which did not necessarily indicate the appeal of our application’s design. Furthermore, our study only included ten representative users and to achieve more reliable results, we would include more users in our user study in the future. Individual differences in our study users may have affected the objectivity of the results we obtained and including more users could help mitigate this. Even though the qualitative analysis allowed us to validate certain aspects of our design to a certain aspect, more user studies would be required to obtain a clearer understanding of the exact strengths and weaknesses of our design. !!Performing another user study in the future, we would design the study around a different quantifiable metric. For instance we could perhaps have representative users rate out of five, how personal they felt their experience with “My Secret Friend” and myDiary was. We did collect similar metrics from users in our current study but we had not designed the study around it. Given more time, we would conduct another study based on having users directly rate aspects of their experience with metrics such as their personal connection with each diary on a Likert scale. This would help us analyze the data with specific metrics which are less ambiguous and hopefully more pertinent to measuring the quality of the user experience. !! ! ! ! ! ! !! ! ! ! !! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !! ! ! ! ! ! !

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C.3 Final Design Rationale and Discussion of the State of Design !!We believe that the quality of design of “My Secret Friend” is at a good level and that it is good enough to compete with popular Windows diary applications. The design proved itself in the sense that users found the interface to be ‘attractive’ and all the major tasks such as adding, deleting, and browsing entries to be easy and quick. Users were able to figure out how to use the interface fairly quickly without any help and they were able to pass the usability goals we had set for our system. When users were asked if they preferred “myDiary” over “My Secret Friend” to write an entry in, nine out of ten users chose “My Secret Friend”. The design of “My Secret Friend” allows users to create, browse, and delete entries. Within each entry, users can embed multimedia such as a video. Users thought that being able to add videos was useful to have but not necessary. However, more representative users would need to be asked about the usefulness of video integration in a diary before we can conclude that the feature adds value to our design. “My Secret Friend” initially allowed users to search for specific entries and dates in which entries were added but after discussing the merits of such a feature with users we dropped it. Representative users of our application did not really think such a feature would be used very frequently, and so we decided the overhead of cluttering the design with infrequently used features was greater than the benefits provided by a search function. Even though the design of “My Secret Friend” has strengths, it also has a few areas where it could use improvement. For instance, the design could be made cleaner and perhaps more customizable to the varying needs of individual users. Whether a customizable diary would provide users with a more personal experience would be preferable could be identified with further user feedback. One integral feature of the design that “My Secret Friend” is currently missing and was brought to our attention by a representative user is that the system does not allow for a way to recover forgotten passwords. Moving forward, this would be one of the features we would add. The design of “My Secret Friend” itself still needs to be quantifiably verified and a second user study with better metrics could help achieve this. Taking into account the strengths, and qualitative user input we believe that our design is one of the most preferable ones for girls aged from 19 to 25 looking to keep a diary on their Windows computers. !! ! ! ! ! ! !! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !! ! ! !! ! !!!!!!!!!

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C.4. Reflection on Design Process !! ! ! ! ! ! !The entire design process was one of the most insane rides we have had to undergo from any of our university courses. We learned that the user-centred design process, if done right, really helps create a product which is likeable and impressive to users. However, it is a very difficult process in the sense that it involves a lot of work at each step of the design process. Further, even after designers spend many hours working on a certain idea, designers have to be ready to discard their work and pursue different lines of thought if the users do not like a design. The user-centred design process did not work for us as well as we would have liked, but this occurred largely because members of our team either did not commit to work or committed to tasks and did not finish them on a timely fashion. In addition, we as a team had overshot the scope of the course and had to change our idea completely more than halfway through the course. This had thrown a wrench into the tentative progress schedule we had planned but we learned from it that this too was part of the design process. We learned that if a design does not appear to be going anywhere then it might be wiser to stop trying to beat a dead horse and start looking for other approaches to the problem or a more manageable problem altogether. !!The methods we chose for our qualitative evaluation imparted us with valuable information on our design and helped us gauge the value of our product from a user’s point of view. The methods we chose for our quantitative evaluation did not however, end up validating our design but we learned from this process, how to conduct a controlled user study and how to statistically analyze the data we obtain from it. We learned from this process the importance of finding the right metric to measure the validity of a product and how even if sometimes, a certain metric feels right it might not be. !!We felt as if the most valuable activity we were asked to try out was to perform a controlled user study to validate our design. There were many potential variables and factors to control to get to the heart of the data we were looking for. And even though, we ended up pursuing a metric which did not validate our study, the process of creating a study plan and performing a design experiment felt scientific and valuable. We are convinced after performing the statistical analysis that controlled user studies are one of the strong weapons in the arsenal of a designer. !!Having gone through 418, we are very likely to never look at a design project the same way ever again. The course was a lot of work and might have gone a bit overboard at times but it was necessary to help us obtain better appreciation of the design process. The next time we are faced with a design project, we will always consider the merits of using a user-centred design process. We will probably visualize the kind of users we expect to see using our system and we will channel all the lessons from EECE418 to help us approach the project from the right direction. No pain, no gain. !! ! ! !! ! !!

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Section D: Resource ManagementRafaat Mir: Brainstormed ideas for new system design - 4 hours!Helped create new low fidelity prototype and obtain feedback on it - 2 hours!Planned medium fidelity design and features with group - 4 hours!Researched competitor diary applications for Windows - 2 hoursHelped create a plan for a controlled study - 5 hoursPerformed statistical analysis on data - 1 hourDesigned and created questionnaire for qualitative analysis of design - 2 hours!Wrote report - 10 hours!!Assuming a front end designer or computer engineer earns at $40/hour, this equates to:30*$40/hour = $1200! !!Rest of the group: Did not fill out this section but probably spent about 30 hours as an estimate. This would would equate to a cost of about 30*$40 = $1200!!So the total cost of the design project for pass 2 for our group would be !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Appendix A - Low Fidelity Prototype of “My Secret Friend”!!Appendix Figure: Picture of Low-Fidelity Prototype Displaying the “Login Screen”, the “Start Screen”, and the “Creating New Journal Entries” !

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Screen Appendix Figure: Picture of Low-Fidelity Prototype Displaying the “Search Screen”, the “Browsing Entries Screen”, and the “Recovering Deleted Entries” Screen!

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Appendix B - User Prototype Feedback Survey! !!How comfortable do you feel using My Secret Friend interface? !a. very comfortable!b. comfortable !c. not comfortable!!!Rate your user experience with My Secret Friend and briefly explain what made you rate the application as you did. !a. 5 - really good user experience!b. 4 - good user experience!c. 3 - moderate user experience!d. 2 - poor user experience!e. 1 - really poor user experience!!!!!Do you think that My Secret Friend was intuitive to use?!a. Definitely, it was intuitive to use almost all of the time!b. Yes, it was intuitive to use most of the time!! c. Neutral, it was intuitive to use only some of the time!! d. No, it was rarely intuitive!e. Not at all, it was not intuitive at all!!!Do you like the navigation system of My Secret Friend? Briefly explain why or why not. !!!!Do you think the media inclusion feature is useful to have or do you think its a distraction? !!!!Do you feel as connected to My Secret Friend as you would be writing to a traditional journal? !!!!If you had to change one feature or one way in which a task in done in My Secret Friend, what would you change?!!!!!!!!

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Appendix C - “My Secret Friend” User Evaluation Questionnaire !

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Appendix D - Statistical Analysis with Controlled User Study Data!

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Statistical Analysis of Word Count on Entries in Two Diaries

myDiary MySecretFriend

117 106

86 75

154 168

119 123

138 185

210 149

187 184

97 86

125 263

84 110

Sum 1317 1449

Mean 131.7 144.9

Degrees of Freedom

10 10

Sum of Squares

189165 239161

Sample Variance

21018 26573.44

Standard Deviation

144.97 163.01

Combined Variance

23795.88

Standard Error of Difference

72.71

t 0.1815

Appendix E - User Study Consent Forms!

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THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

Department of Computer Science 2366 Main Mall Vancouver, B.C., V6T 1Z4

April, 2015

Sample Questionnaire Consent Form

Human-Computer Interaction Course Projects (ECE 418) UBC Ethics Approval

Principal* and Co-Investigators Dr. Sidney Fels, Prof., Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, UBC (604) 822-5338

Student Investigators Razana Tariq 7789192002 Dallas Leclerc 2507519562 Rafaat Mir 6044422559 Goomin Kwon 6043499580 Alara Ozturk 7789900580

Project Purpose and Procedures

This course project is designed to investigate how people interact with certain types of interactive technology. Interactive technology includes applications that run on a standard desktop or laptop computer, such as a word processor, web browser, and email, as well as applications on handheld technology, such as the datebook on the Pocket PC, and also applications on more novel platforms such a SmartBoard (electronic whiteboard) or a Diamond Touch tabletop display.

The purpose of this course project is to gather information that can help improve the design of interactive technology. You are being asked to complete a questionnaire to assist us in that regard. We expect it will take you approximately 20 minutes to complete the questionnaire.

Although only a course project in its current form, this project may, at a later date, be extended by one or more of the student investigators to form the basis of his/her thesis research.

ECE 418 <Tariq, Leclerc, Kwon, Ozturk, Mir> Ver_Quest 1.00, April 2015 Page ! of !1 2

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