StoryBoards
Each member of the team completed two storyboards, one sketched and one with photographs, to show off a potential design solution. To consider divergent ideas and scenarios, we did not limit ourselves to exploring just one specific design problem or form factor.
These storyboards were helpful to understand how a design solution would realistically fit into the work life of a record store employees. Ultimately, they led us to decide to design a website. We chose to do a website since all of the employees we talked to used computers with internet, and we wanted to respect their wishes to not introduce additional technology. The website would primarily serve as a pricing aid, compiling prices from online marketplaces to make a quick price recommendation to the employee based on the album and its condition.
Information Architecture
Planning out the screens and structures of our website allowed us to refine the functionality that we wanted to focus on. We decided to feature four main functionalities from the home page, Seattle Trending Records, Store Inventory, Want-list, and Settings. We identified these as the most important features towards achieving the goal of helping record store employees price and catalog records more efficiently, as well as helping them stay relevant in the local community.
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From critiques and discussions within our group, we decided that the Seattle Trending Records did not achieve the goal of pricing records that we were intending to do. Additionally, there were too many functions listed under the Store Inventory button, so it needed to be broken up into smaller subcategories for easier use.
Paper Prototype
Before beginning the paper prototype, we revisited a few employees who we interviewed at the beginning of the process to confirm that our product focused on pricing would be useful for record shop employees. After speaking with them, it was apparent that this type of tool would not be useful since the employees already use Discogs, an online marketplace for records, to price records and would likely not want to switch platforms.
One employee mentioned that is was difficult to keep track of previous sales, given that they are mostly handwritten, and leverage those past prices to make appropriate pricing decisions. With this in mind, we pivoted our design to focus primarily on inventory, store analytics, and the Wantlist, all while maintaining an authentic, nostalgic, record shop feel.
Paper prototypes are a quick, and cheap way to flesh out ideas without getting too attached. Before creating the prototype, we brainstormed three key tasks which the prototype would support.
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Set up store account and layout
i. The participant would set up an admin account, invite employees to join their store, and begin to set up their store layout.
2. Add records to inventory
i. The participant would price two different records and add them both to their inventory. One of the records would have relevant past sales that they would use to make an appropriate pricing decision.
3. Input daily sales.
i. The participant would remove records from their inventory, simulating the end of a day of sales.
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Next, we would evaluate our prototype by conducting usability tests with four participants.
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User Evaluations
Using our paper prototype, we conducted usability tests with four participants. Our main goal was to identify points in the three main task flows of the website that were either confusing or too complex. The three main features that we tested were: Set up a store account, Add and price records to the inventory, and Input Daily Sales. Observations from these evaluations informed us of areas in our design that we would need to refine.
Participants:
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We tested our prototype with four participants, two college students, one software engineer, and a current record shop employee. We were not concerned that only one participant was from our target user group as we were primarily interested in evaluating the overall usability of the site.
Method:
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Each participant was walked through a scenario to better situate them in their task. We collected data by observing and listening to them as they “thought aloud” throughout the task. At the end of each task we asked a couple questions regarding the overall usability and had an additional list of questions for our target user.
Findings:
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Through observing our participants work through their tasks, we learned that users:
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Found it confusing to invite additional employees
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Immediately closed out of and did not read the pop-up tutorial to set up a store
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Were unable to find the help button to return to the tutorial view
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Thought the set up store layout process to be overly tedious
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Appreciated the feature to base prices off of previous sales, but found it confusing
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Wanted more detailed information on the Add Item to Inventory screen (e.g. pressing information of vinyl)
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